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Troops have tough questions for rumsfeld { December 8 2004 }

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   http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-120804rumsfeld_lat,0,6514552.story?coll=la-home-headlines

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-120804rumsfeld_lat,0,6514552.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Troops Have Tough Questions for Rumsfeld
By Mark Mazzetti
Times Staff Writer

2:58 PM PST, December 8, 2004

WASHINGTON — During a brief visit to a makeshift camp in the Kuwait desert today, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was peppered with questions by anxious troops awaiting deployment to Iraq who wanted to know why some soldiers were still being sent into the violent country with insufficient protection against the deadly insurgency.

In the middle of the "town hall" meeting with troops at Camp Buehring, one of the many U.S. bases scattered throughout the tiny nation, one soldier asked Rumsfeld why some troops were forced to rummage through local landfills to search for scraps of armor to attach to their vehicles.

"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," said one Iraq-bound soldier, whom the Associated Press identified as Spc. Thomas Wilson of the Tennessee National Guard.

"We do not have proper armored vehicles to carry with us north," he said, amid cheering by his comrades.

Rumsfeld responded that the Pentagon had taken great efforts to equip its soldiers deploying into Iraq, but that military plants could only churn out so many armored vehicles per month.

"It's essentially a matter of physics," he said. "It isn't a matter of money. It isn't a matter on the part of the Army of desire. It's a matter of production and capability of doing it."

The ongoing insurgency in Iraq, Rumsfeld said, has forced the Pentagon to shift priorities toward outfitting every vehicle in Iraq with proper armor, which was not seen as necessary when U.S. troops launched the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

"As you know, you go to war with the army you have," Rumsfeld said. "They're not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time."

Rumsfeld, who had told troops to ask him "tough questions," got what he asked for when a number of soldiers also took the Defense secretary to task for poor condition of the equipment given to the National Guard and the Pentagon's "stop-loss" policy — keeping thousands of troops on active duty after their commitment to the military has expired.

"My question is what the Department of Defense, more specifically the Army side of the house, is doing to address shortages and antiquated equipment that National Guard soldiers ... are going to roll into Iraq with?" asked another soldier.

Rumsfeld said he had been assured by commanders that there was no double standard between active duty and reserve troops in terms of quality of equipment, and that the best equipment was going to those troops likely to see the most combat action.

At the Pentagon, spokesman Lawrence DiRita sought to play down the confrontation, saying the pointed questions were just a small part of an overwhelmingly positive session.

DiRita also praised the American military industry for adapting to the insurgency and ratcheting up the production lines of armored Humvees. Three out of four Humvees in Iraq are now properly armored, he said.

"It's one of the great sort of stories of what happens in the United States when the country is at war," said DiRita. "When the country's at war, the war begins and then we start to mobilize, and this is a perfect example of the kind of mobilization that took place."

Yet the soldiers' complaints add more ammunition to Bush administration critics who argue that the Pentagon was ill prepared for the bloody post-conflict insurgency that has claimed the lives of more than 1,000 U.S. troops.

The insurgency that gathered in strength during the summer of 2003 revealed large gaps in the military's supply system, and industrial plants could not keep up with requests by commanders in Iraq who began asking for armored vehicles and body armor to protect their troops.


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