Yeah, because it’s all about RUMMY and not about soldier’s dying.
Don’t you think he should be embarrased by the approximately 18 month failure to take action? It’s been obvious for a long time that in central Iraq there is no safe communication zone where unarmed people and unarmored vehicles can travel at will.
Rummy’s answer was production limitations are the cause of the problem. Do you ignore the statement by the producers of the armor retrofits that they aren’t using their full capacity and have told the army they could make such kits faster?
And, as I understand it from new reports, this is a Tennessee reporter covering a Tennessee National Guard outfit who has watched them, and others, struggle to get protection for their vehicles. After a while you awfully tired of bullshit from the straospheric levels of DOD. And tired of kneejerk support of the Administration in Washington.
It’s increasingly obvious that this administration is no more interested in “supporting the troops” than they are in bringing democracy to Iraq. They won the election, so even half-hearted PR crap is out the window. It’s just going to be deflection and criticize-the-critics, with NO measure of accountability, no answers, no explanations, and no apologies.
Not sure what the guy said on TV last night, but yesterday they were reporting that they reported the increased capacity to the Pentagon just last month. This is a company which did just 50/month in 2002 and 73/month in 2003. They only recently ramped up to 450/month.
So no, I don’t ignore that statement. I do, however, allow for the possibility of a whole month passing between the company telling the Army they could increase production by more than their entire 2003 rate in a month and the Army believing them enough to get an order out.
Amazing how far the Bush supporters will go to deflect any blame or responsibility. Blame the manufactureres, blame the reporters, what the hell…blame the troops. Anyone but the administration.
It sounds like a reporter just encouraged the soldiers to ask the questions that needed to be asked. Does that make the question less legitimate or Rummy’s answer less repugnant?
This is such SOP for the White House that I’m amazed so many people still fall for it. Anyone who embarrasses the administration is instantly demonized and the suject is changed from the nature of the embarrassment to attacking the whistle blower/media/questioner. etc.
They’ve changed the story. It’s no longer about why they don’t give a fuck about protecting US troops, it’s now about that mean old nasty reporter somehow brainwashing a GI to make Rummy look like an asshole.
We have to keep our eyes on the ball, man. We can’t let these swine keep distracting us and changing the subject. Make the fuckers answer the question for once.
It seems to me there was a fair amount of furor and outrage a while back over companies such as Halliburton getting awarded no-bid contracts to supply goods and services.
Now there’s a fair amount of outrage over insufficient materials being available in a short period of time.
I have worked in the DoD procurement process, following a 1.9 billion procurement from inital RFP to award. It cannot be done quickly.
When the government needs something fast, and it’s expensive, awarding it to one company that has a proven track record is the way to go. This is seldom done, in part because people scream about it. In response to the screaming, the government has an cumbersome, expensive, and long award process, which can identify a supplier more or less utterly fairly (heh heh) (pardon me). But that takes a great deal of time.
Those people that are outraged at this latest abject failure – how many of you were also outraged about the quick award the Halliburton?
And how do you reconcile the two outrages? What should the government be doing? Following its lengthy procurement process? Awarding to a single company without bidding? What?
Given the rather serious need for armored vehicles in Iraq – this has been an issue for over a year – don’t you think the Pentagon should have been pushing to get increased production? Don’t you think they should have jumped on that increased capacity as soon as they learned about it?
All of which ignores the point that the invasion was completely unnecessary in the first place. It’s not a question of going with what you have in an emergency, it’s about going unprepared when you didn’t have to go at all.
And WTF does Halliburton have to do with armoring trucks?
I have complete confidence that the Pentagon pushed for exactly that. Companies don’t invest for 10X production on a lark or without a pretty good idea that they’ll get an order to cover the new invested overhead.
I’m also pretty confident that if they told the Pentagon that they were ready to go to 500 or 550 or whatever and the Pentagon said go ahead without checking things out and it later turned out that the higher production rates resulted in substandard vehicles people would be screaming about that instead.
That creaking sound you hear is the shifting of blame.
Well, that settles that! Manny, whose utterly non-partisan stance is an inspiration to us all, has “confidence”. There, that’s all sorted out.
Yes, he was a plant. Here’s the thing: you do not do something like this to someone in your chain of command. That is what is known as “detrimental to good order and discipline”. That is what a chain of command is for. If you get no satisfaction you go up the chain. If at that point you get no satisfaction, you register an IG complaint. If at that point you don’t like your answer, that’s just a whole bunch of tough noogies. But you don’t do what that guy did.
What’s more, I hate how people think that soldiers are just people to be co-opted. Michael Moore did it in Fahrenheit 9/11, this reporter did it here, Hackworth does it for his quotes, and so on. Soldiers are not supposed to talk about their superiors out of school. As it is, I go too far sometimes posting here, and most of you think that I don’t say anything big. But some of the stuff I have said in the past could concievably get me at least an Article 15. I’m serious. You simply don’t talk trash in public on your superiors. So yeah, the soldiers are obliging, but someone gives them the set-up, and the set-up guy isn’t the one that pays the price for it.
What would Ike think of this?
I agree, that is worrysome. What’s worrysome is the apparent attitude that since they are American soldiers, they shouldn’t have to take a soldiers’ chance. That they deserve to come home with nary a scratch and live the life that the Armed Forces owes them. That’s not how it works.
There’s nothing wrong with the equipment, there’s something wrong with the mindset. Every single time I go up in the aircraft, war or peace, there is the possibility that I will die. I accept it, I am pragmatic about it, and I move on with my life. There is some sort of illusion of safety that these guys want that I just don’t understand. Next thing you know they’ll want Starbucks in their MREs instead of Folgers. Or an electric blanket for those cold desert nights. Or Wi-Fi in tent city.
We’ve fought so many “easy” military actions since Vietnam and we’ve become so enamored of technology that we think that the mighty US Armed Forces can win with little or no losses. Well, here’s a wake up call… this is what war really is. Not Grenada, not Panama, not Kuwait, this is what it’s all about. And since there’s no institutional memory of World War II and very little left of Vietnam, it’s been forgotten. Hopefully this time we’ll have people that remember.
The reaction from the soldiers is enough for me to realize that the question was on the minds of all of them. It then is a valid question. I don’t think there is an ethical dilemma that the reporter discussed the question with the troop beforehand and worked to get that troop in front of the microphone.
In my mind, a more ethical dilemma would have been made if there was an atmosphere that made the soldiers afraid of repercussions, and because of that did not ask a question that was clearly on everyone’s mind.
And I’m shocked. Stunned. Amazed. That an ex-spouse had a less than glowing opinion of Wilson’s tact. (This is news?)
Okay, fine, this is a fair argument that Rumsfeld could have made. Instead, he lied and said that the problem was “a matter of physics” i.e., that they simply could not be made faster. Last time I checked my physics textbooks, there were no equations governing the politics of weapons procurement by the government.
I have to question the legitimacy of this statement. Coming from a military family, I do agree that order and discipline are linchpins of the functioning army, but what happens when your Commander in Chief lets the army down?
The decision to go into war in Iraq was not a pressing one. If I were a soldier, asked to defend my country in a time of war, I would feel highly betrayed and demoralized if I was sent into conflict lacking the necessary tools to accomplish my task.
I don’t know if this generalization is really accurate. I would speculate the soldiers are aware of the risks they face, but ANGRY that they are being put in unnecessary danger. The US appears to have one of the best armies in the world, so why aren’t they equipped properly? As for the idea that there is nothing wrong with the equipment, what about the stories we are hearing about mothers raising money at home to send body armour to their kids because the army won’t provide it?
- Rebekkah
I don’t understand how this argument proves anything. If you don’t do this for the reasons that you state then I would imagine that you still don’t do it even if a reporter tries to put you up to it. (Unless you are making the tinfoil hat claim that this guy is really a “plant” in the sense that he isn’t a soldier at all and the woman they interviewed on NPR this morning is just pretending to be the boyfriend of this supposed soldier.)
And, with all due respect to you, I think if you accurately describe the way the military works then it is even more f-cked up than corporate America. In bureaucracies, sometimes you have to go through other routes than the chain of command.
So, every soldier who was there for the purpose of posing questions directly to the SecDef, by the request of the SecDef, should have submitted them through the entire chain of command?
Kind of defeats the purpose of the exercise…
Are you kidding me? You really think ANYONE would be complaining about pulling out all the stops to get more armor to our troops? That’s the kind of views I’d expect Ann Coulter to come up with. “Liberals hate supplying our troops.”
Any comparison between buying more armor for troops from the few companies that make it and the sole-source contracting for the construction of Iraq’s oil fields is extremely intellectually dishonest.
There are many legitimate questions that should be raised about sending in the Vice President’s old company to perform reconstuction projects at what may be grossly inflated prices. The key question boils down to, were these contracts sole-sourced in the legitimate interest of national security, or for a dubious need for political expediency?
On the other hand, one must be operating on an entirely different plane of reality to argue that maximizing production of armor plate on the shortest timescale possible is NOT directly related to the safety of our troops.
As General Myers himself said in the transcript you linked to earlier, manhattan, Congress has thrown as much money as possible at the armored Humvee problem, and the Pentagon is still telling troops that they’re just going to have to wait… and wait… and wait… and wait. And that doesn’t even begin to address the even larger problem of the trucks which transport goods and supplies to the front lines, an extremely few of which have ANY armor whatsoever.
Bush and Rumsfeld started drawing up war plans in 2002, ferchrissakes, and the insurgency has been growing for 19 months. If production of up-armored Humvees had been ramped up back when President Bush declared mission accomplished, there would be somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 more of those vehicles than there are today. Hell, I even remember some talk around that time about bringing large numbers of M-117s out of the graveyards to send to Iraq. However, Rumsfeld said, no way. I guess these Vietnam era tracked vehicles didn’t fit in with his vision of a smaller, lighter military. Well, Mr Secretary, you’ve certainly got your wishes now.
What’s more, instead of being on top of this problem, Rumsfeld blithely asserted that the up-armor and the ballistic kits don’t matter that much anyways, because even tanks have been blown up by IEDs. Well, Mr. Secretary, what type of vehicles do you travel around in when you’re abroad?
The only thing more I can say is, God help the fury of the conservatives should this crisis have happened during the Clinton administration.
Conflict of loyalties. Military training exploits a fundamental human instinct: loyalty and committment to the immediate group, in a soldier’s instance, his “buddies”. It is a visceral bond, more powerful than almost any other. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard men say that they are astounded to leave the Army and find out that they aren’t particularly interested in being in touch with men they would have died for a year earlier.
All military outfits, of whatever nationality, of whatever ideology exploit that instinct. Wounded men insist on returning to the front because they feel guilty about letting down thier buddies. Men don’t throw themselves on a grenade for the USA, Mom, and apple pie, they do it to protect their comrades.
They are also expected to be loyal to thier service, and as long as these loyalties coincide, as long as the service is seen as being equally deserving of loyalty, there is no problem. But when those loyalties conflict…when the service is seen as letting down the troops…the loyalty to one’s comrades always takes precedence. Whether this is as it should be is not mine to judge.
I’m betting this backfired on Rummy. I’m betting he was planning on a town meeting pep-rally, with lots and lots of masculine shouts of solidarity, with softball questions and gushes of mutual admiration. The kind of thing that GeeDubya exploits at every opportunity. But this time it backfired, and Rummy was caught off guard.
He wasn’t prepared to answer the question, he wasn’t expecting it, that’s pretty clear. He wasn’t really opening the floor for permission to speak freely, he was pimping for a photo-op to show the folks back home how Our Heroes support the Admin 110%, sir!
If the question had been asked by one lone malcontent, gold-bricking whiner, everyone around him would have inched away in silent disdain. But they didn’t, they cheered for his courage and audacity because…he was defending his buddies! Loyalty number one.
Whoops, I apologize to manhattan for using that quote. I meant to quote Bricker from here:
My mistake. But the reference to manhattan’s linked transcript still stands, however.