Troops Put Tough Questions to Rumsfeld

CAMP BUEHRING, Kuwait - After delivering a pep talk designed to energize troops preparing to head for Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld got a little "talking to" himself from disgruntled soldiers....

Army Spc. Thomas Wilson, for example, of the 278th Regimental Combat Team that is comprised mainly of citizen soldiers of the Tennessee Army National Guard, asked Rumsfeld in a question-and-answer session why vehicle armor is still in short supply, nearly three years after the war in Iraq.

"Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor our vehicles?" Wilson asked. A big cheer arose from the approximately 2,300 soldiers in the cavernous hangar who assembled to see and hear the secretary of defense....

Rumsfeld replied that, "You go to war with the Army you have," not the one you might want, and that any rate the Army was pushing manufacturers of vehicle armor to produce it as fast as humanly possible....

"You can have all the armor in the world on a tank and it can (still) be blown up," Rumsfeld said....

--AP

Appalling! Why do our troops hate our troops?

(Other soldiers complained about the fact that Army troops get better equipment than Guard and Reserve troops, and about the stop-loss program.)