Rumsfeld on the Defensive

Rumsfeld's meeting with troops in Kuwait on Wednesday received a lot of media coverage. Some of the troops told of scrounging through a landfill for scrap metal and bulletproof glass to protect their vehicles.

"Why don't we have those resources readily available to us?" Specialist Wilson asked Mr. Rumsfeld, drawing cheers and applause from many of the 2,300 soldiers assembled in a cavernous hangar here to meet the secretary.
A few minutes later, a soldier from the Idaho National Guard's 116th Armored Cavalry Brigade asked Mr. Rumsfeld what he and the Army were doing "to address shortages and antiquated equipment" that will affect National Guard soldiers heading to Iraq.

Rumsfeld response was "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time."

You go to war with the Army you have if you cannot choose when you go to war. If you can choose (and clearly the timing of our invasion was our choice), you go when you are ready. These shortages, of both troops and equipment, come from a lack of planning. If you don't plan for the very thing that most experts, including your own Army Chief of Staff told you to expect, then you are not ready to go to war.

If the generals really did not ask for more troops (as Bush claimed while campaigning) until this week, then they should be fired for incompetence. Of course, they probably saw how General Shinsheki was stripped of his authority for speaking the truth about the difficulty of securing Iraq, and decided their job was to do whatever the Commander-in-Chief wanted with whatever resources the Administration was willing to give. And those resources have not been enough. Who is going to be held accountable?