Rummy's First Baby

Is defective:

Sept. 5 — The Bush administration’s military predicament in Iraq has suddenly gotten worse.
JUST A MONTH before the next U.S. Army unit is due to deploy in Iraq to relieve the hard-pressed forces already there, the military is confessing to a potential showstopper. The deploying unit’s new armored vehicles may have faulty armor which would leave them vulnerable to machine-gun fire and to the rocket-propelled grenades that are the Iraq insurgents’ favorite weapon.
The vehicle is the prized new Stryker wheeled troop carrier, advertised as the first fruit of the Army’s plan to transform itself into a lighter, go-anywhere-fast force.
Worse still: the Army has known it might have a problem since February, but has kept quiet about it. An Army memo sent yesterday to the head of the Stryker program, and obtained by NEWSWEEK, reports: “Evidently this issue was first raised in February 2003. Am unsure how this issue escaped public scrutiny for six months.” Not even Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was told, NEWSWEEK has learned. “Understand that ARSTAF [Army Staff] have been told to treat this issue as if it were ‘classified’,” says the memo, which is addressed to Lt. Gen. John Riggs, the head of the Stryker program. At a recent Army meeting to discuss the faulty armor, the main topic on the agenda, according to a DOD source, was: “How do we tell Secretary Rumsfeld?” Rumsfeld is now in Iraq. According to the memo to Riggs, the Army briefed “selected staffers” on Capitol Hill yesterday.
Unlike the massively thick steel that tanks are made from, the 19-ton Stryker has a light steel and aluminum structure. But this is clad in 130 ceramic tiles, supposedly tough enough stop heavy machine-gun fire and deflect the blast of incoming RPGs. More than 600 Strykers have been built by General Dynamics, which has a $4 billion contract to produce 2,100 in all. But the ceramic armor tiles are produced for GD by a German subcontractor. The problem arose when the German firm apparently changed the mix of ingredients in the tiles. (The firm could not be reached for comment.)
The Army discovered this in February, sources say, when, as standard quality control, some tiles were X-rayed. Further tests revealed that, on some batches of tiles, the subcontractor had changed not only the ingredients but parts of the manufacturing process too. In August, a tile from one of those errant batches failed to stop machine-gun bullets in a live-fire test at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in northern Maryland, according to Army sources.