A secret Pentagon study has found that as many as 80 percent of the Marines who have been killed in Iraq from wounds to their upper body could have survived if they had had extra body armor.
Such armor has been available since 2003, but until recently the Pentagon has largely declined to supply it to troops despite calls from the field for additional protection, according to military officials.
The ceramic plates in vests now worn by the majority of troops in Iraq cover only some of the chest and back.
In at least 74 of the 93 fatal wounds that were analyzed in the Pentagon study of Marines from March 2003 through June 2005, bullets and shrapnel struck the Marines’ shoulders, sides or areas of the torso where the plates do not reach.
Thirty-one of the deadly wounds struck the chest or back so close to the plates that simply enlarging the existing shields “would have had the potential to alter the fatal outcome,” according to the study, which was obtained by The New York Times.
For the first time, the study by the military’s medical examiner shows the cost in lost lives from inadequate armor, even as the Pentagon continues to publicly defend its protection of the troops.
Officials have said they are shipping the best armor to Iraq as quickly as possible. At the same time, they have maintained that it is impossible to shield forces from the increasingly powerful explosives used by the enemy. Yet the Pentagon’s own study reveals the equally lethal threat of bullets.
The vulnerability of the military’s body armor has been known since the start of the war and is part of a series of problems that have surrounded the protection of American troops. Still, the Marine Corps did not begin buying additional plates to cover the sides of their troops until September, when it ordered 28,800 sets, Marine officials acknowledge.
Military officials said they originally decided against using the extra plates because they were concerned they added too much weight to the vests or constricted the movement of soldiers.
Marine Corps officials said the findings of the Pentagon study caused field commanders to override those concerns in the interest of greater protection.
“As the information became more prevalent and aware to everybody that in fact these were casualty sites that they needed to be worried about, then people were much more willing to accept that weight on their body,” said Maj. Wendell Leimbach, a body-armor specialist with Marine Corps Systems Command, the Corps’ procurement unit.