When the Pentagon leaked a few worst-case scenarios, hardly anyone discussed them. And when the General Accounting Office issued several scary reports raising questions about our readiness for biological or chemical war, hardly anyone read them. The hour is late for this conversation to take place, but it must.
Let’s look at the most probable scenario. The invasion begins with a devastating barrage of cruise missiles. Saddam tries to hunker down for the kind of house-to-house urban combat that he hopes will bloody the United States. The U.S. military, worried about casualties, refuses to play that game. As the noose tightens, Saddam, out of options, does what he did in Kuwait in 1991 but on a much larger scale: he burns oil fields, sending toxic fumes everywhere. And this time, he has no chance for survival, so he unleashes whatever biological or chemical weapons he can get his hands on.
How prepared are we? To hear the official military line: totally. Our soldiers, sailors and airmen have trained extensively in their Nuclear, Biological, Chemical (NBC) suits. But talk privately to military personnel and they’ll often tell you how much they loathe such training. Some find it hard to even type into their computers with the gloves they are expected to wear. A few admit to cheating a little in the exercises (by stripping off the gloves or shortening the drills), because the suits are so cumbersome.
Then there’s the military supply line, which has moved from SNAFU to FUBAR (F–ked Up Beyond All Recognition) First, a huge batch of gas masks turned out to be defective. After that got fixed, the Pentagon admitted that 250,000 defective suits were unaccounted for somewhere in the system. These aren’t the first suits sent into combat but the replacements. The problem is that under a biological or chemical attack, each suit only lasts a couple of days. Which means that four or five days into a war, it’s time to play Russian roulette with the NBC suits. I thought this might be an exaggeration until I spoke to Raymond Decker, the ex-Marine who spearheads some of the GAO probes. He couldn’t in good conscience set my mind to rest.
Recently, I learned of another potential vulnerability. Battlefied medical care. One imagines military trauma care as on the cutting edge of modern medicine, and it often is. But in recent years, problems have surfaced.
The GAO found in 1996 that the United States was luckier than we knew during the first gulf war. Not only were far fewer killed and wounded than expected, but the system wasn’t prepared to handle significant casualties. “Understaffed and inadequately supplied and equipped medical units in Operation Desert Storm might not have been able to provide adequate care if the predicted number of casualties had occurred,” the report said. It turns out the Pentagon had not accounted for the possibility of “non combat” casualties–that is, those behind the front lines hit with chemical weapons. Fortunately, Saddam didn’t use them that time. Another report that year identified weaknesses in the U.S. Air Force’s capacity to airlift the wounded out of the theater and a shortage of hospital beds at bases around the world.
But that was then. They’ve fixed the problem, right? Lots of drills and exercises? Well, not really. A 2001 GAO report found that “no realistic field exercise of medical support for a CB [chemical-biological] attack has been concluded.” An October 2002 report found that the Pentagon was slow to respond to the lessons of the gulf war and had made few improvements since the 1996 reports, which also found medical training for treating biological and chemical attacks to be insufficient. More recently, the Pentagon simply failed to provide the GAO enough information to prove its assertions of progress in these areas.
Last month, a 1,000-bed hospital ship arrived in the Middle East. Maybe this ship and backup facilities will be enough to handle all of those wounded by Saddam Hussein and in need of immediate treatment. Or maybe it won’t. Persian Gulf roulette.
