Soldier Opens a Can on Rumsfeld

Did anyone else enjoy the US Soldier, Spc. Thomas Wilson, fragging Secretary of War Rumsfeld in Kuwait last week? With one simple question, and the cheering response of the rest of the soldiers in the audience, Rumsfeld was first rendered speechless. After buying some time by asking the soldier to repeat the question [and Spc. Wilson elaborated further], Rumsfeld told the cheering soldiers that they should just suck up.

Here is the question: "Why do us soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-arm our vehicles? And why don't we have those resources available to us?" Rumsfeld then asked Wilson to repeat the question. "A lot of us are getting ready to move north relatively soon. Our vehicles are not armored. We're digging pieces of rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass ... picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles to take into combat. We do not have proper armament vehicles to carry with us north."

Rumsfeld's lame reply: "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.''

Just over a month ago, Sen. John Kerry was saying the same thing as Spc. Wilson--that the US troops were not properly equipped. Bush repeatedly denied it, saying he would supply the troops and commanders with everything they needed. Thanks to Spc. Wilson's question, we now know that was a lie. In the days after the Bush Administration's disasterous 'morale-building' trip by Rumsfeld, the president of the sole manufacturer of armoured Humvees, Armour Holdings, said that their company was NOT making the Humvees at full capacity. In fact, he said that in November, he had notified the Army that they could make 100 more armoured Humvees a month, but the Pentagon never got back to him.

The question becomes whether the US President and Secretary of War should be held to the standard of telling the truth? They both failed miserably. Despite traveling the US campaigning that he was doing all he could to protect US troops, Bush was lying. Do you really think the US would have been so slow in producing armoured Humvees if Bush had publicly said 'Get our troops the armoured Humvees as fast as they can be made!' Do you think that the manufacturer would have been running at 22% below capacity if they had?

Secondly, I have two illustrations from WWII that are illuminating:

Rummy went on in his answer to say that "If you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up,” Well, that is somewhat true. They sure can, but you have to use different explosives--what blows up a tank is different from what blows up a Humvee--just like what blows up an armoured Humvee is different from what blows up the Humvees we sent with the troops to Iraq.

I thought of WWII when Rummy said the 'Tough s**t' portion of his answer. The vaunted Sherman tank was actually a deathtrap for thousands of American soldiers in WWII. It was no match in armour or in firepower to the German tanks it faced in France and Belgium. But, it was a trade-off, because the Sherman was made in such huge numbers that the US could use the Grant-like tactic [and later, Chinese tactic] of overwhelming an enemy with larger numbers than they could handle. A lot of Americans died in Shermans, but the tactic worked. But, the politicians' lies about the Sherman were that it was tough and durable, which explains the fact that 60 years later, those deathtraps are still remembered by the line 'Strong as a Sherman tank.'

Secondly, according to Stephen Ambrose, a US Army report called Combat Exhaustion showed that most men are ineffective for combat after 140-180 days [Band of Brothers, p. 203]. As in Vietnam, US troops are under the near-constant threat of death, and are attacked almost daily. How long have our troops been in Iraq? Do the math yourself--I put 180 days as mid-September 2003. Now, maybe there is a link between the seemingly unrrelated facts of the Marine who shot a badly wounded, unarmed POW in front of an NBC camera crew and the Rumsfield humiliation. Maybe the Marine who shot the POW had just lost it after too much time in Indian Country--I have no idea how long he had been there. But did you ever stop to think that maybe he showed signs of combat exhaustion because each and every day, he may have been riding around in a Humvee that had no armour plating, and he knew that it was a deathtrap? That would be terrifying, and I can see how that might have been lessened if he felt safer from the possibility of random death on a daily basis in an unarmoured Humvee.

I also note this, from the second article I linked in this post:

Just a passing thought. Back in 1993, following the infamous “Blackhawk Down “ disaster in Somalia, Clinton’s Secretary of Defense Les Aspin resigned amidst allegations that he had failed to provide the troops in Somalia with the armored support they needed to do their mission. House and Senate Republicans, including several who hold majority leadership positions today, were in the forefront calling for Aspin’s ouster.

Once again, the right is holding a Bushite to a much lower standard than they held a Clintonista. Why has the GOP not called for Rumsfeld's resignation, if for nothing else than to show that Bush is not willing to accept less from his SecDef than the right expected from Clinton's? In Somalia, 20 American soldiers died in the incident that led to Aspin's departure. I do not know the number of soldiers among the 1300+ killed in Iraq who have died because of unarmoured Humvees, but I suspect the number is a lot more than 20, yet the same GOP that demanded Aspin's resignation is willing to accept not only far more eggregious conduct from Rumsfeld, but also his and Bush's lies about the incident.