Just playing devils-advocate, but extra armor also decreases mobility, so in some situations it could have caused more casualties. There is more than one side to any story, but to sell newspapers and magazines, an article has to put some spin on the truth to make it interesting.
It sounds heartless, but you go to war with the equipment, tactics, and forces you have at the time. As the lessons are learned, you adapt to the situation by improving everything from equipment to tactics.
There is no magic "armor tree", and our budget is finite. What else would have had to be cut to try to speed up armor production? The new generation of tactical radios? The new up-armored humvees? The shorter versions of the M-16 that are necessary to be able to fight from within vehicles?
War sucks and armchair quarterbacks that don't have to actually make the decisions or fight are usually worthless sacks of crap with an agenda. As soon as they come up with the crystal ball that turns them into the perfect military strategists and long-range planners, they can run everything. Until then, second-guessing of this type is a sure sign of someone with a personal agenda, not someone who actually gives a crap about the troops or the war.
Don't get me wrong, it's valuable to look back and dig out the lessons that need to be learned, but those jerkwads pointing fingers and trying to pin down blame for combat casualties are not doing it out of interest for the troops. They're looking for a good story to sell papers, or trying to make someone look bad while making themselves look prescient. Well, 20/20 hindsight makes it pretty easy to second-guess decisions other people made...
"declined to make it available"... Right. There are roving packs of Generals in the pentagon laughing about the suckers in the desert because they're not going to get sent the secret warehouses full of body armor we magically produced "since 2003". The real story is more along the lines of a prototype was developed in 2003 but it cost about a million bucks per vest because there were no factories set up to produce the new materials and design. Funding the new design took 6 months because you can't get anything approved outside of the budget cycle, and ramping up production started half a year later.
Anyone remember the story about the brand new armor that went out, that ended up failing the military QC tests? They rushed that stuff to the field and it even saved lives, but it didn't actually meet the performance specs in the contract because it was rushed to the field.
Yea, they're laughing it up at the pentagon about how they sure fooled all those grunts in Iraq who thought their superiors gave a damn about them... For their next trick, they're going to stop sending bullets or maybe halt the delivery of shoelaces.
