Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [347]
Pointing out the window at the lively, free, and prosperous city, I said, “There’s the answer.”
CHAPTER 44
The Army We Had
“You go to war with the Army you have—not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
—December 8, 2004
At Camp Buehring, a staging area in Kuwait for U.S. troops headed into Iraq, I held a meeting for some who would soon be deploying northward into a difficult fight against Iraqi insurgents. As I did dozens of times during my six years as secretary of defense, I gave the troops a chance to ask me any question they wished with the media there. After two questions from the audience, a soldier from the Tennessee National Guard raised his hand to ask the next one.
“Our soldiers have been fighting in Iraq for coming up on three years,” he began. “A lot of us are getting ready to move north relatively soon. Our vehicles are not armored. We’re digging pieces of rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass that’s already been shot up, dropped, busted, picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles to take into combat. We do not have proper armament vehicles to carry with us north.”1
He was raising a serious issue, one that was of concern to the troops and the Army—as evidenced when some of the members of the audience applauded.* I thought the question deserved a careful explanation, and I saw it as an opportunity to provide an overview of the steps the Army was taking to correct the problems they were experiencing. I responded at length:
I talked to the general [Steven Whitcomb] coming out here about the pace at which the vehicles are being armored. They have been brought from all over the world, wherever they’re not needed, to a place here where they are needed. I’m told that they are being—the Army is—I think it’s something like four hundred a month are being done. And it’s essentially a matter of physics; it isn’t a matter of money. It isn’t a matter on the part of the Army of desire. It’s a matter of production and capability of doing it.
As you know, you go to war with the Army you have—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.
I can assure you that General Schoomaker and the leadership in the Army, and certainly General Whitcomb, are sensitive to the fact that not every vehicle has the degree of armor that would be desirable for it to have, but that they’re working at it at a good clip. . . . [T]he goal we have is to have as many of those vehicles as is humanly possible with the appropriate level of armor available for the troops. And that is what the Army has been working on.2
Lieutenant General Steven Whitcomb, commander of Army forces in the Persian Gulf, came forward to follow my answer by explaining that any delays were “not a matter of money or desire.” He added, “It is a matter of the logistics, of being able to produce [the armor].”3
The exchange might have seemed straightforward to most of the people at the base. It seemed that way to me. But unfortunately only a few words of my extensive answer—“As you know, you go to war with the Army you have—not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time”—ended up being isolated in print and as a seemingly endless loop on cable television. The comment was characterized by some critics, and particularly their contacts in the press, as an example of insensitivity.4 I did not see my remarks that way, and I still don’t. My statement carefully laid out the reality of the armed forces that existed when President Bush took office. Any president and any secretary of defense has available the military that their predecessors bequeath to them. The B-1 bomber I approved as secretary of defense in 1976 was being used in Afghanistan in 2001,