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Posted Feb. 18, 2003
Insight on the News - National
Issue: 04/29/03
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U.S. Forces Face The Bio-Chem Test
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
Are U.S. troops unprepared to fight if
Saddam Hussein uses chemical or biological
weapons? Or are the nervous Nellies of the
antiwar movement just trying to create
panic?
Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes was all doom
and gloom in a recent report on
preparations under way at the Pentagon to
train and equip troops to fight in an
environment contaminated by chemical or
biological weapons. According to Wallace
and his cooperative witnesses, the troops
haven't received proper training, their
equipment is faulty and they are going to
die. For military commentator David
Hackworth, a retired Army colonel whose
harsh criticism of Pentagon bureaucrats
appeals to many on both left and right,
the Defense Department has made a mockery
of nuclear-biological-chemical (NBC)
training. "Truth to tell, the troopers
call [NBC] 'nobody cares,'" he
told Wallace. Rep. Christopher Shays
(R-Conn.) told Wallace: "It's a fact that
a vast majority of our troops are not
properly trained in biological and
chemical warfare. And it's a fact that by
not being properly trained they're not
ready."
Wallace went on to cite a series of
government audits during the last two
years -- one by the Department of the
Army, several others by the General
Accounting Office (GAO) -- that found
significant shortcomings in the
battle-worthiness of gas masks and other
protection gear. "A U.S. Army spokesman
said many of the small tears in these gas
masks could be fixed with duct tape,"
Wallace said. Right on point, Shays
responded, "It's a pretty pathetic
comment, isn't it?"
So are U.S. troops heading into a death
trap in Iraq for which they have been
ill-prepared by the Pentagon leadership?
Or is it all just hype, intended to scare
any who remain undecided on the war?
Few military planners doubt that Saddam
would use his chemical and possibly his
biological weapons, as Insight reported
several weeks ago [see "Justice Looms
for Saddam, Cronies," March 4-17]. But
whether those weapons would be effective
or even dangerous to U.S. military
personnel remains a matter of hot dispute.
As commanding general of the U.S. Army
Soldier and Biological Chemical Command,
Maj. Gen. John Doesburg is the Pentagon's
top officer in charge of designing
protective gear and making sure it gets to
the troops in a timely fashion. He
reminded reporters at a specially
organized briefing following the 60
Minutes report that the effectiveness of
chemical- and biological-warfare agents
depends mightily upon the weather.
Too cold, he said, and mustard gas
"would, in fact, be frozen. It freezes at
roughly 56 to 58 degrees Fahrenheit,"
rendering it militarily useless. Too hot,
and sarin and VX nerve gas evaporate. Too
much light, he said, and many biological
agents simply die. In fact, Doesburg and
other military analysts point out, for
Saddam to launch an effective military
strike using chemical or biological
weapons against U.S. troops, the weather
would have to be just right and the
quantities of agent would have to be
simply massive.
The United States abandoned its
offensive chemical- and biological-weapons
programs more than 30 years ago, not
because of arms-control agreements, which
only came into play later on, but because
the Pentagon never was convinced they were
of any significant military use. "The
general view was that these things weren't
battlefield weapons," says Stephen Bryen,
a former deputy undersecretary of defense.
"The Iraqis reinvented them as weapons of
terror by using them against their own
Kurdish civilian populations in 1988."
During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, U.S.
troops repeatedly donned bulky protective
gear in the desert as faulty
chemical-weapons detectors sounded false
alarms. When a real chemical threat
approached from toxins released into the
air by the controlled explosion of an
Iraqi chemical-munitions bunker, not even
commanding Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf paid
any attention. As a result, the Pentagon
now believes, some 161,000 soldiers were
exposed to low-level contamination from
nerve gas that has led to a complex of
diseases known collectively as gulf-war
syndrome. Since then, the Pentagon says,
it has worked hard to field better
detectors and better protective gear, and
to improve the training troops receive.
The Pentagon claims that virtually all
of the false alarms that occurred in
Kuwait during the 1991 fighting originated
from non-U.S. systems carried by
specialized vehicles loaned to the
coalition by Germany and the Czech
Republic. Since then, the United States
has developed a new detector, called the
Automatic Chemical Agent Detector Alarm
(ACADA). It uses ion-mobility
spectroscopy, which the Pentagon claims
makes it more reliable than the older M8
detectors that were based on chemical
reagents and were sensitive to heat as
well as to all kinds of battlefield
pollutants.
The ACADA system was tested extensively
against more than 80 battlefield
pollutants to eliminate false alarms
without diminishing its accuracy in
detecting actual chemical-weapons agents.
"Now, is that to say we won't have a false
alarm? We might," says Brig. Gen. Steve
Reeves, the Pentagon's program executive
officer for chemical and biological
defense. "We still can get about 1 to 2
percent false alarms on this system if
it's overwhelmed with an interferent. You
know, if you held it up to the tailpipe of
a vehicle, why, yeah, it would probably go
off. But 98, 99 percent of the time, we've
got an improved detector and we're
convinced that we fixed the problem."
The Pentagon says it has purchased more
than 20,000 of the new chemical-weapons
detectors and has deployed them
extensively throughout the Persian Gulf
theater with U.S. troops. New biological
detectors also have been deployed that are
programmed to detect the 10
biological-weapons strains Saddam is known
to have developed.
In his 60 Minutes exposé,
Wallace also raised fears that the
chem-bio protective gear used by U.S.
troops was massively unreliable.
"Somewhere out in the field are up to
250,000 defective protective suits, with
holes and torn seams -- part of a batch of
800,000 defective suits that were
distributed," he said, referring to a
report from the GAO released last October.
But the Pentagon says the GAO audit
referred to chem-bio suits left over from
the 1991 war, known as the "battle-dress
overgarment," or BDO. Wallace showed file
footage of troops struggling to don the
heavyweight rubberized suits as chemical
alarms went off in training exercises,
suggesting that U.S. troops were sitting
ducks to an Iraqi chemical attack.
The new suits, called the Joint Service
Lightweight Integrated Suit Technology
(JSLIST), are made of a lighter-weight
material that can be laundered, while the
masks have been redesigned to allow
soldiers a wider angle of vision. The
Pentagon has procured more than 1.5
million of the JSLIST suits, distributing
two to each soldier and three to each
Marine in the battle theater. Once
contaminated, each suit offers complete
protection for up to 24 hours, at which
point soldiers must head to a
decontamination area and wash off before
changing into a new suit.
And just in case of an unlikely,
massive and sustained Iraqi
chemical-weapons attack against U.S.
troops, the Pentagon has stockpiled
another 3 million of the older suits. "The
thing about the battle-dress overgarment
is this report has to do with suits that
were produced more than a decade ago,"
Reeves told reporters. "The actual
important numbers here are three and zero.
We checked three times, and there are zero
defective suits in our contingency
stocks."
What about those missing 250,000 suits
that so outraged Shays? Retired Col. Dave
Shaver, a former teacher at the U.S. Army
War College, says, "Someone on his staff
should have told him that these suits were
'expendable' supplies, and no longer
needed; that some were consumed in
training, and excess quantities were
destroyed."
As for the lack of training, Wallace
forgot to mention that the U.S. Army
Chemical School at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo.,
this year will graduate more than 6,300
nuclear, biological and chemical
specialists. "There are some 15,000 of
these specialists in the Army, spread
across the active Army, the Army Reserve
and the Army National Guard," says Col.
Tom Spoehr, commander of the 3rd Chemical
Brigade and director of training for the
school.
These specialists are assigned to
combat units and train others to detect
chemical and biological attacks and
decontaminate equipment. As part of their
training at Fort Leonard Wood, Spoehr
says, they undergo drills with live nerve
agents. "We have trained over 65,000
people in this facility without a single
accident or incident." That battlefield
confidence is essential to troops in the
field.
But the real fear of military planners
is of a massive humanitarian disaster,
provoked by Saddam to slow down an allied
advance on Baghdad and to generate
international pressure on the United
States to stop the war before he is
overthrown.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
laid out the risks to WMAL radio talk-show
host Chris Core on March 4. "If force has
to be used and Saddam Hussein's regime
decides that the game is up, they could
conceivably use chemical or biological
weapons on their neighbors, neighboring
countries," Rumsfeld said. "They could use
them on U.S. forces or coalition forces in
neighboring countries or in Iraq. They
could also use them on their own people
and blame it on the coalition forces,
which they've done before. They have used
these chemical weapons on their own
people. So that certainly is a risk that
is among those risks that we have to
consider."
Mike Amitay of the Washington Kurdish
Institute says Kurdish groups in the north
have received nothing in the way of
assistance to prepare for an Iraqi
chemical or biological attack. His
organization has offices in northern Iraq
to coordinate humanitarian assistance, and
he is worried about the almost total lack
of protection or decontamination equipment
for Kurdish civilians. "We're even more
concerned about covert deployment,
poisoning of wells, human disease
carriers, the covert introduction of
biological weapons," he tells Insight.
"Given the high rate of respiratory
diseases and other serious medical
disorders in northern Iraq, it would be
very difficult to detect a covert BW
[biological-weapons] attack."
The Pentagon has begun to sketch out
what U.S. military and civilian-aid
agencies are prepared to do to aid the
Iraqi people should Saddam turn his
weapons against them.
"We are deploying a full range of
capabilities to the field and will be able
to address medical emergencies, including
chemical- or biological-weapons attacks,"
a senior Pentagon official tells Insight.
"Will we help civilians? Of course we
will. We're Americans. That's what we do."
Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer
for Insight magazine. email the author
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