US hails MRAP, war vehicle that saved lives, despite bureaucracy

US defence officials have held a ceremony to congratulate themselves on the creation of an armoured vehicle that helped protect American troops, but acknowledged the programme succeeded in spite of the Pentagon's own entrenched bureaucracy.

During the Iraq war, as homemade explosives inflicted heavy casualties on soldiers riding in standard Humvee vehicles, senior officers had appealed to Washington for heavier trucks better designed to withstand insurgent bombs.

But their request met with opposition in the Pentagon and in the US Congress, and it took a concerted push from then-defence secretary Robert Gates and others to rush into production new vehicles known as MRAPs, or mine resistant ambush protected vehicles, officials said.

"Commanders saw an urgent need," Ashton Carter, deputy defence secretary, said at the ceremony on Monday honouring the team that pressed for the MRAP. "They requested urgent assistance from the Pentagon, a plea that initially went unheeded, a mistake that forced the department to permanently alter its whole approach to meeting urgent battlefield needs."

As Pentagon chief, Gates had voiced his "frustration with the business-as-usual approach he found too often here, and led to his decisions in many cases simply to bypass the system, as with the MRAP task force", Carter said.

Gates, who stepped down last year, would often lament how "the troops are at war, but the Pentagon is not", Carter said.

In a written note read out at Monday's event, Gates praised the task force he appointed - which expedited the delivery of more than 24,000 MRAPS to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, at a cost of roughly US$45 billion.