Army Struggles with Backlog of Damaged Gear

TEXARKANA, Texas, Feb. 10, 2007 — -- As Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the top uniformed official in the Army, warned Congress this week that the United States should increase military spending, the nation's Army depots were straining to overcome a backlog of tanks, Humvees and weapons in need of repair.

The Pentagon has sent about 40 percent of its military equipment to the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. There, it is routinely targeted by small-arms fire, rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs.

"We're wearing out helicopters and trucks, Humvees, tanks at rates that are six, eight, 10 times, in some cases, what we're programmed for," Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, told members of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense on Friday.

The equipment ends up at repair sites like the Red River Army Depot, amid the brush of the sparse Texas plains. The battle-scarred hulks have stacked up by the thousands.

"We are absolutely busting at the seams with work," Col. Douglas Evans, commander of the Red River Army Depot, told ABC News.

The depot, one of five across the nation, includes several staging areas where old Humvees, trucks and Bradley fighting vehicles go after they've been shot at, run down and blown up in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the depot, a Humvee goes from an unusable wreck to completely refurbished, with 85 percent new parts, in nine days.

But if the war were to end today, Army officials say it could take up to three years afterward to fix all the equipment they have used. The repair backlog has left Army units training without all their equipment.

"There's a big problem right now because they simply don't have enough equipment," said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, a national security Web site that closely tracks military equipment. "You've got units that are basically leaving their equipment in Iraq for their replacements. Coming back over here they don't have equipment to train on.

"You train like you fight and you fight like you train," he added. "If you don't have the equipment to train on, it's going to be a problem when you go over there to fight."