[.ca] Pentagon Wars

NO DVD?!!:
HBO Better get the act together and come up with a dvd real soon, i'm not impressed with them at all. Well enough of that now, great film and Kelsey Grammer and company did a fine job here. So get the movie. DON'T WASTE YOU TIME TRYING TO FIND IT ON DVD!

Funny, but not accurate:
No question there were alot of funny moments in this film based on the book by Col. Burton but as you can easily guess, if it's an HBO film, there will be more fiction than fact. Here's some info from a military analyst who saw the film: "1) How accurate was the movie? Not at all. I was driven to take notes after the first few minutes and got over sixty substantive errors. The producers took Col. Burton's simplistic but compelling memoir, dumbed it down, took dramatic licence with a lot of things that didn't need it, goofed around with the chronology, and apparently had a head-on collision with an office full of libel lawyers who demanded even more blurring than there already was. The result is a mockery both of the very real issues surrounding the Bradley and of Burton's very genuine display of moral courage. I'd say it was also a piss-poor excuse for a comedy, but I'm a military historian, not a movie critic. 2) What were the actual problems with the Bradley and how were they resolved? Most of the actual problems with the Bradley - aside from mechanical teething problems that any armored vehicle has - arose from the fact that no one really had a clear idea of what an infantry fighting vehicle was supposed to do at the time the project was started in 1964 - it wasn't even called that at the time; all that was really clear was that current armored personnel carriers and armored infantry doctrine weren't going to be well-suited to the armor-rich, artillery-rich, and likely nuclear/biological/chemical battlefield environment expected in a putative European war versus the Warsaw Pact. This uncertainty led to incredible amounts of bureaucratic muddle and intraservice chest-thumping within the Army - the movie version of _The Pentagon Wars_ at least manages to get a little of that across, in spirit, anyway - and kept the project on the back burner all through Vietnam, when the Army wasn't paying a lot of attention to mechanized infantry issues anyway. This problem was exacerbated by a parallel muddle on the armor side of the service, which had repeatedly failed to field a satisfactory vehicle for its armored cavalry units. By this time (~1975) both branches were faced with block obsolescence of their existing vehicles, so they had to meld their requirements into what was essentially a single vehicle, which became the Bradley. Incorporating all the necessary capabilities into a single chassis that had originally been built to tight dimensional limits due to rather questionable airportability concerns and an equally questionable requirement for amphibious capability required a lot of tradeoffs that didn't satisfy purists very much. How were these problems dealt with? A number of ways. Some of them were doctrinal: the Army looked for ways to exploit the capabilities of the vehicle and nurse its limitations. Some were technological: in particular, various survivability enhancements were added at a cost in weight and money. Some were simply bureaucratically defined out of existence. How successful these measures has been is still the subject of debate, some of it in this very newsgroup; see Deja News for details. For that matter you can also see W. Blair Haworth, Jr., _The Bradley and how it got that way: mechanized infantry organization and equipment in the U.S. Army_ (unpub diss, Duke University, 1995; available through UMI) 3) Did any Bradley's sustain hits from enemy fire in the Gulf war and how did they and the crew survive those hits? It's a hard question to answer meaningfully; BFVs of various marks served in the theater, and a good number were hit in combat, often by weapons and at aspects that wouldn't be survivable by main battle tanks - Bradleys took more friendly fire than any other vehicle type. In general, they stood up to what they were designed to stand up to; the debate is still whether the design requirements were appropriate." Lastly, anyone that would try and draw a correlation between the BFV and a national missile defense system would find themselves comparing apples to oranges since we had an accurate and functional ABM system for a number of years until eliminated by the ABM treaty.

Its happening again! Army now pushing lav3stryker deathtrap!:
What makes this film so haunting is that its a true story that is repeating itself before our very eyes with the Army's thin-skinned, air-filled rubber-tired LAV-3 Styker armored car boondoggle that will get our men killed in combat. The film shows the exact same PR tactics and lying "spin" the Army and DoD use to put people second and their programs/promotions first. The depiction of how the Army will cheat on tests to masquerade that "all is well" with a program is common as seen by the recent efforts to deceive the public by flying overweight lav3strykers a short distance by C-130 aircraft with less fuel inside to compensate--exactly how in the movie the Bradley's fuel tanks were filled just with the minimum fuel to drive in front of the audience grandstands and to the aim point for the test anti-tank weapon to hit it. The tragedy is that after 2 decades, the Army today is rushing the lav3stryker deathtrap into production without ANY live-fire testing against fully fueled and ammo loaded vehicles fired at by RPGs or 14.5mm heavy machine guns thanks to a loophole in DoD procurement. Too bad Colonel Burton wasn't on duty now in the Pentagon. When they make the sequel to this movie, "Pentagon Wars II: the lav3stryker" it looks like the ending will not be a happy one with a better vehicle (upgraded M113A3 Gavins) going into service. The horror of hundreds of dead American Soldiers Colonel Burton wanted to prevent will be our wake-up call. If we ignored this film and Col Burton's book its based on, what makes us think the Pentagon will change after needless deaths?

It would be very funny if it were not based on a true story:
The acting is great and the storyline funny and sad at the same time. Viola Davis, my favorite actress, is great as usual. I recommend the film.

Brilliantly on target:
It is well-known that when it comes to procurement, the Department of Defense does not usually put a priority on such incidentals as whether the item actually works. DOD history is cluttered with such gold-plated duds as the Sergeant York gun and the infamous $7600 coffeemaker. "The Pentagon Wars," a made-for-cable film originally aired on HBO, is a devastatingly satirical -- and true -- look at one such boondoggle, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Col. James Burton (Cary Elwes) is a by-the-books Air Force officer who is given the job of making sure the Bradley is effective and ready for use. He quickly learns that the vehicle is a Frankenstein's monster, designed by committee and unable to do any of the tasks it was meant for, but which is being built anyway. In his attempts to adequately test the vehicle, Burton is up against Gen. Partridge (Kelsey Grammer), who is determined to get the Bradley into production no matter what. After all, it has been 17 years in design, with $14 billion already spent on it. Who cares whether it works or not? Burton does, actually, and is equally determined to make sure the Bradley actually works before he signs off on it, an attitude which does not earn him plaudits from Partridge. Running interference are Col. Bock and Maj. Sayers (John C. McGinley and Tom Wright), who sabotage every one of Burton's tests with darkly hilarious results. (The buy-it-now-and-test-it-later culture is, unfortunately, alive and well in the Pentagon even today. No better illustration exists than the $50 billion -- pre-cost overruns -- National Missile Defense, now in production despite failing most tests and passing a few only under grossly rigged test conditions.) "The Pentagon Wars" is a darkly gleeful look at the government weapons procurement culture. Pick it up if you get a chance.