SPARE PARTS SHORTFALL

The Army overcame enormous logistics obstacles in the successful march to Baghdad last spring, but sustaining the force has become a problem, a senior Army general said.

Gen. Paul J. Kern, chief of the Army Materiel Command, cited as an example the Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, which he said have sustained so much wear and tear in Iraq that the Army is months short of replacements for the steel tracks on which they travel.

Kern said the Army also is in short supply of replacement tracks for Abrams tanks, Paladin howitzers and other vehicles. Similarly, the Army has had trouble supplying tires for Humvee utility vehicles and generators for electrical power, Kern said in an interview at the Pentagon.

Kern said these shortfalls are being addressed and have not created a major combat readiness problem. He said they reflect the difficulty of maintaining a high pace of operations in Iraq at the same time the Army remains active in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world.

"We haven't closed down Afghanistan, we've still got people operating in the Balkans, and I've got my eye on Korea," he said. "So we can't take all the resources of the U.S. Army and send them all to Iraq."

Asked whether U.S. officials had anticipated at the outset of the Iraq war that the postwar stabilization phase would last so long and require so many troops, Kern said, "Some did. Some didn't."

"It's a question of, 'Did you do enough?' The answer right now is, 'Probably not,' " he said. " 'Did you not plan for it?' We did. But again it's a question of how you spread all those resources."