Gates: MRAPs save 'thousands' of troop lives

Armored trucks designed to withstand roadside bomb blasts have saved "thousands of lives" and prevented at least as many maimings since being sent to Afghanistan and Iraq, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in an interview with USA TODAY.

Gates, who retires Thursday, said he pushed to get more Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles to the front after a 2007 article in USA TODAY reported that no Marines had been killed in 300 attacks on MRAPs in Iraq.

"Nothing was happening," said Gates, who pushed the Pentagon bureaucracy to speed production of the vehicles.

MRAPs have proved to be 10 times safer than Humvees in such attacks, Gates said, and anecdotal evidence shows that troops in MRAPs are less likely to suffer burns than they are in Humvees.

"Another value not to be underestimated is the impact on the morale of the troops," Gates said. "Not only in knowing they can survive these attacks but that the folks back home are willing to do whatever it takes to protect them."

Gates declined to cite a specific number of lives saved. "Thousands and thousands of lives have been saved and multiples of that in terms of limbs," he said.

The Pentagon's Joint Program Office for MRAPs estimated that as many as 40,000 lives have been saved -- 10,000 in Iraq and 30,000 in Afghanistan. It based its estimate on the number of attacks and the number of troops inside a vehicle but said the details of how they arrived at the estimate are classified.

Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution, said the 40,000 figure seems high. Afghan security forces suffer about three times the losses of U.S. troops, he said, or about 2,000 a year. Still, he said, if MRAPs had saved "even 3,000, it's clearly worth it."

If casualty tolls had reached even half the number of estimated lives saved, support for the wars would have evaporated, said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, a defense policy organization.

"If you had that kind of body count, we would have been out of there quite some time ago," Pike said.

Through June 24, 4,453 U.S servicemembers have been killed in Iraq and 1,526 in Afghanistan.

Today there are 27,000 MRAPs in war zones and on training bases at a cost of nearly $45 billion. MRAPs have V-shaped hulls that deflect the force of bombs that blow up beneath them. The trucks' raised chassis keeps the crew compartment further from the main force of the blast of improvised explosive devices, the No. 1 killer of U.S. troops.

The 2007 USA TODAY story was among several detailing the shortcomings of Humvees with their flat bottoms and lighter weight over MRAPs. In 2008, USA TODAY reported that the Pentagon's Inspector General found that an urgent plea in 2005 from Marines for MRAPs went unanswered because officials mishandled the request. The report referred to an earlier Army study that described the Humvees as "death traps" in mine attacks.