Rumsfeld Questioned by Troops, Offers No Answers
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld went to visit his war earlier this week and discovered that not everybody thinks things are going well. He gets points for taking unscripted, unscreened questions from the men his zeal has put in harm’s way, unlike the commander-in-chief. At the same time, he’s smart enough to know that tough questions from non-coms require good answers. He didn’t have any.
In a democracy, every citizen has the right to question the government’s policies, and while the military code of conduct circumscribes what warriors may do, they retain the title of citizen. So, when Army Specialist Thomas Wilson of the 278th Regimental Combat Team, a Tennessee National Guard unit, asked an uncomfortable question of the Secretary of Defense, he was not committing treason, nor giving aid and comfort to the enemy. He was acting like a citizen of the American republic while stationed in Kuwait awaiting order to head into Iraq.
Q: Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor [an ugly verb meaning to increase armored protection] our vehicles?"
RUMSFELD: 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.
The Pentagon website left out the cheering from the other soldiers around Specialist Wilson. It is an immutable fact that soldiers gripe. Napoleon’s veterans were called grognards, meaning grumblers; Caesar’s Tenth Legion bitched and moaned across the Mediterranean world, and Alexander’s phalanxes complained all they way from Macedonia to India. But this isn’t whining, and it takes on a truly worrisome dimension when the grumbling isn’t about bad food and being away from home. Specialist Wilson was complaining that, two years after the build up in preparation for war, the most powerful economy backing the most powerful military in human history can’t get enough armor to help troops defend themselves against people with no military structure behind them.
As for Mr. Rumsfeld’s assertion that a nation goes to war with what it has, he is disingenuous to the brink of willful malice. America chose to go to war in Iraq, picking both the time and the circumstances, with Mr. Rumsfeld’s personally demanding reduction upon reduction in force levels in the planning stages. A year and a half ago, the president flew onto an aircraft carrier pretending to be Tom Cruise in “Top Gun” and declared major combat operations at an end. And the troops are scrounging for armor in landfills.
In practical terms, this is getting American troops killed. New York City Firefighter Christian Engledrum (Ladder Company 61 in the Bronx) raised a flag before Ground Zero stopped burning, a place where over 300 of FDNY died rushing in while the bond traders and lawyers ran out. As a member of the National Guard, he was called up and sent to Iraq. As November gave way to December, he died when a car bomb exploded next to the Humvee in which he was riding. The failure of the Pentagon to get the troops what they need did what Usama bin Laden couldn’t. Supporting the troops doesn’t mean putting yellow ribbon magnets on the back of the family SUV.
© Copyright 2004 by
The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without
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