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December 9, 2004
Expecting to lift the spirits of troops stationed in Kuwait yesterday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld instead faced harsh questioning from soldiers about inadequate armor and equipment. Specialist Thomas Wilson told Rumsfeld that soldiers had to "scrounge through landfills" for scrap metal and bulletproof glass to protect their trucks, according to the New York Times. Rumsfeld told the troops to deal with it: "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have a later time." Sen. Chris Dodd wrote a response to Rumsfeld stating, "You go to war with the Army that our nation's leaders provide."
- There are 6,500 Humvees today without adequate protection. In a spin session later in the day, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita conceded that as late as the fall of 2003, the military was producing just 15 armored Humvees a month, less than 4 percent of today's production capacity. According to Di Rita, one quarter of Humvees in war zones today are unarmored. The bottom line: soldiers in Iraq today don't have armored vehicles because of poor planning. Our troops deserve better.
- The Bush administration provided no money for additional vehicle armor. According to testimony by the Army's Vice chief of staff late last year, the military needed 8,400 armor kits for Humvees in Iraq and Afghanistan. President Bush responded by submitting a budget in early 2004 that proposed nothing for Humvee armor kits.
- Rumsfeld doesn't understand the dangers our troops face everyday on the ground. Rumsfeld stated yesterday that "if you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can still be blown up. And you can have an up-armored Humvee and it can be blown up." Paul Rickhoff, a Iraq War veteran who is now with the soldiers' advocacy group Operation Truth noted, "Having the armor increases your survivability much more than not having it. For [Rumsfeld] to say that is an indication of how little he understands the dangers of the battlefield," according to USA Today.
Daily Talking Points is a product of the American Progress Action Fund. |
Daily Talking Points is a product of the American Progress Action Fund. |
