Our soldiers have been fighting in Iraq for coming up on three years. 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 that’s already been shot up, dropped, busted, 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.
This was widely reported already, of course. The above is from an official DoD transcript of the event, availible here
This was actually the second time he had to say it. The transcript reveals that the assembled soldiers began to applaud when Wilson paused the first time, causing SECDEF to request a repeat of the question.
Rumsfeld was stunned. This was a classic case of sandbagging, not so much because the soldier asked an unpolitic question but because he was utterly unprepared for such an incisive question. I got the idea that SECDEF got outside of his bubble, the one where everything's going okay, and got hit with a good dose of reality.
His reply (which you can read in full and I won't completely excerpt here) was typical hand waving huffing-and-puffing. He didn't reply with a contemptuous attitude, mind, it was respectful in tone, but the reply itself was an insult to the intelligence of anyone who cares about how this war is fought. The part that irritated me the most:
As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time. Since the Iraq conflict began, the Army has been pressing ahead to produce the armor necessary at a rate that they believe – it’s a greatly expanded rate from what existed previously, but a rate that they believe is the rate that is all that can be accomplished at this moment.
Well, we went to war with the "Army we have" three years ago. Just how much time do you all need to get off the dime, Mr Secretary?
Meanwhile, over on Planet Eschaton, Atrios relays the following despatch:
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday the Army was working as fast as it can and supply is dictated by “a matter of physics, not a matter of money.'’
Jacksonville, Florida-based Armor Holdings last month told the Army it could add armor to as many as 550 of the trucks a month, up from 450 vehicles now, Robert Mecredy, president of the company’s aerospace and defense group said in a telephone interview today.
The above is an excerpt of his excerpt of a report from Bloomberg. Real eye-opening stuff.
So, what do we have here? The SECDEF portrays the military establishment as just working so dam' hard to get our troops what they need, it's physics not money, and we're just doing everything we can (insert handwaving and huffin'n'puffin) to fix the situation; and the only supplier there is for Humvee armor is saying "Well, we can get popping on this, we can increase production right now with no added cost. Nobody's asked us. We're ready when they are."
This is why I don't trust the Administration to lead us to anything but ruin. They lie to us and they don't care. They don't bother to make sure thier facts equal our reality-based reality. They just make stuff up. And they expect us to believe it. And they are quite gobstopped when we don't.
If you aren't rich or Republican connected, you're really on your own today.
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