Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld took part in a Q&A with the troops today that was anything but cozy. Disgruntled soldiers complained to Rumsfeld about long deployments and a lack of armored vehicles and other equipment. From the Associated Press:
"You go to war with the Army you have," Rumsfeld replied, "not the Army you might want or wish to have."Can't say that's the most comforting answer.
Spc. Thomas Wilson had asked the defense secretary, "Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?" Shouts of approval and applause arose from the estimated 2,300 soldiers who had assembled to see Rumsfeld.
"We do not have proper armored vehicles to carry with us north," Wilson, 31, of Nashville, Tenn., concluded after asking again.
Wilson, an airplane mechanic whose unit, the 278th Regimental Combat Team of the Tennessee Army National Guard, is about to drive north into Iraq for a one-year tour of duty, put his finger on a problem that has bedeviled the Pentagon for more than a year. Rarely, though, is it put so bluntly in a public forum.
Rumsfeld said the Army was sparing no expense or effort to acquire as many Humvees and other vehicles with extra armor as it can. What is more, he said, armor is not the savior some think it is.
"You can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can (still) be blown up," he said.
0 comments:
Post a Comment