“You go with what you have, not what you want or wish you had”
From the fist time I read this something sounded really really wrong with this answer. It just seemed so unconcerned, harsh, and irresponsible. The more I think and read about this remark, the more pissed of I get. It sounds like something I would say, then get my ass reamed over by some higher ranking officers. Sadly, Rumsfeld does not have many standing above him, and I don’t picture President Bush coming down hard on a guy he seems to be totally sold on and supports to the end. The initial phase of the war went well, but it’s been going down hill from there, though nobody up at that level seems to acknowledge this trend.
One of the main sources of casualties there is the roadside bomb, something we’ve known about for well over a year now. From what I’ve read, the efforts to increase the number of armored vehicles have been coming along fairly well. It looks like the full amount of armored vehicles will be on hand within the next six months. By most standards, this is pretty impressive. But how do you feel if you are one of the guys who doesn’t make the cut and rides in an un-armored truck? Personally, in the year I was over there, I never rode in an up-armored HMMWV, and never was bothered too much. It was fun riding without doors anyway. Then again, if given the choice, I’d rather have something more than the body armor I was issued halfway into the deployment between me and the RPG’s, IED’s, and AK-47 rounds out there. Then again, I never really felt super threatened over there, perhaps a form of denial. I felt like both laughing and disgusted when I started seeing the field modifications on trucks back around a year ago. While rusty pieces of iron welded together to make boxes in the back of trucks looked pathetic, especially for what is supposed to be the best equipped army the world has ever known, function always triumphs over form in these situations.
The answer Mr. Rumsfeld gave seems out of context with this war. We were not taken off guard, we made the timeline and decided to go with what we had over what we need. Notice the lack of the word need in his response. I guess what is actually needed is an afterthought. I know nothing can be done to make good on the mistakes of the past, but accountability would be nice. While this issue is not new at all, I’m glad it’s again being brought to the forefront. It stands as evidence that we jumped into this endeavor too quickly. It indicates a lack of foresight – I don’t expect crystal balls to be implemented, but did the possibility of roadside bombs and ambushes on completely unarmored vehicles come up as one of the potential threats we would encounter over there? How do you not take preventative measures against what is turning out to be one of the primary killers of our troops in Iraq? And finally if you do screw up and fail to plan for such things, why not take any accountability for this mistake? Instead, we keep the same major players in place for this operation (unfortunately by the choice of almost sixty million voters), the same ones who keep making mistakes that result in graves. The sad thing is that many of these same mistakes had already been made ten years earlier, and are addressed in this document: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB63/doc10.pdf
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