From The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 12/8/04:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/202906_rummyed.html
Scrapping for armor
There ought to be a medal to reward the courage demonstrated yesterday
by Army Spc. Thomas Wilson, one of the Tennessee Army National Guard
citizen soldiers who make up most of the 278th Regimental Combat Team
preparing to leave Kuwait for action in Iraq.
To the cheers of his comrades, Wilson asked Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, "Why do we soldiers have to dig through local
landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to
uparmor our vehicles?"
Rumsfeld, whose cold-iron scowl can wilt uppity members of Congress,
asked Wilson to repeat the question.
"We do not have proper armored vehicles to carry us north," Wilson
insisted.
Rumsfeld's flinty response:
"You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or
wish to have at a later time."
In other words, quit your bellyaching.
Of course, going to war in Iraq with any sort of army was a choice,
and a misguided one.
There were no threatening weapons of mass destruction.
There was no link to the 9/11 attacks or their perpetrators.
The war's timing and the troop strengths and level of equipment were
all decisions made by Rumsfeld and President Bush.
They were bad choices.
They've meant too few troops to maintain security, let alone civil
order, and they exposed U.S. troops to unnecessary risks through
insufficiently armored vehicles.
And there's more to it than simply underestimating the ferocity of
insurgent resistance to the U.S.-led invasion.
The situation in Iraq casts doubt on Rumsfeld's thesis of a new way to
wage war -- using quick strikes with fast vehicles on tires instead of
tracks.
It proved an effective way to achieve a battlefield victory against a
far weaker adversary but has left our forces unprepared and unequipped
to maintain the peace.
Roughly half of American deaths might have been prevented with
better-armored vehicles.
Rumsfeld should have recognized the notion of U.S. troops scavenging
garbage dumps for makeshift armor as the outrageous scandal that it is
and should have promised his troops the heads of every responsible
officer.
Instead, he told his troops to suck it up.
__________________________________________________________
Harry
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