Dereliction of duty?

English Common Law holds that we all, whether as individuals or as members of an organisation, have a Duty of Care to others irrespective of whether they are known to us or not.
This being the case, I find it hard to understand why someone has not brought ministers and senior Civil Servants in the Ministry of Defence to book over the number of service personnel killed by mines and IEDs in Afghanistan. Warnings about the inadequacy of the kit that army personnel have to put up with are as old as the campaign itself. Yet, every day we hear horror stories of troops forced to patrol in Snatch land Rovers designed for use in Ulster, inadequate body armour or faulty or missing mine detection equipment.
The latest inquest on the deaths of the first female soldier and three SAS TA troopers reinforces the point that someone, within the MOD or the military, sent these young people out on patrol knowing full well they did not have the right equipment to protect them from harm. They travelled in a Snatch Land Rover - christened the mobile coffin because of its total unsuitability for conditions in Afghanistan - with only one working mine detection system and a bare minimum of training or instruction on its use.
That is negligence of the highest order and a patent dereliction of duty of care. Yet, as we all know, none of the civil servants repsonsible for specifying, ordering and supplying this equipment will be blamed. Neither will any of the politicians, including Gordon Brown, whose parsimony towards the Armed Forces has been repaid with the loss of countless young lives.
His excursions to Afghanistan, clad in the very best body armour money can buy, are as fleeting as his encounters with the truth. He will still rise at at PM's questions, solemnly intone the list of the latest casualties, lie about the number of armoured cars he has actually allowed to be ordered and then resume his seat without a shred of shame or discomfort at the risks he has subjected our forces to thanks to his penny-pinching.
If I were a clever lawyer with any sort of a conscience I would have gone after him for breach of duty of care a long, long time ago. It may not succeed, but, at the very least, it would expose him to the kind of cross-examination on a public stage that he will never have to face in Parliament or through the media.