The Rumsfeld grilling
As about everyone in the country knows now, yesterday in Kuwait Spc. Thomas Jerry Wilson, a guardsman of Tennessee's 278th Regimental Combat Team, asked SecDef Donald Rumsfeld the following question:

"Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?" he asked, speaking of used, shot-through bulletproof glass and using a military slang term for retrofitting one's Humvee with metal plates for additional protection. "We do not have proper armored vehicles to carry with us north."

Wilson, as it turns out, is from Nashville, where I was born and raised and about 15 miles from where I live now.

I'm trying to get my arms around this question both as a retired Army officer and the father of a regular-force US Marine who has a better than 50-50 chance of going to Iraq when he finishes training as an AAV crewman next spring.

I come at this question from three angles:

1. The brass of Spc. Wilson for having the effrontery of asking the SecDef the question at all, especially in a public forum with national media present. Actually, this concerns me least because when the SecDef stands up in front of the troops and says he'll answers whatever questions they have, he'd be a dummy not to expect something like Wilson's question. No doubt his chain of command is (maybe) embarrassed by the Q, but tough for them, too. A proactive command-information program would have already explained the answer to the troops so they wouldn't need to ask Rummy.

2. The fact of the armor shortage: Rumsfeld essentially said that the Army was doing the best it could to add armor to Humvees, but there was a limit to how many could be "up armored" per month. It is an industrial-capacity limit, he said, and (apparently) not much can be done about it, at least not quickly.

"It's essentially a matter of physics," Rumsfeld said. "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."

I am not confident that the much-vaunted and derided military-industrial complex has near the surge and sustainment capacity that people think. Extended ground combat hasn't been done by US forces since ancient times (namely, the Vietnam war). From about 1971 to 2001, the mantra I heard many times was that the next war would be a "come as you are" war, which Rumsfeld repeated when he told Wilson, "You go to war with the Army you have."

But that's not really a satisfactory answer because while you go to war with the Army you have, you don't stay in the war with the Army you have. The CAYA war mantra I kept hearing was really meant to illustrate two things about a prospective Soviet invasion of western Europe:

that the long mobilization times we had enjoyed in all wars previous, except Korea, weren't going to happen for WW3. The units on active duty when the war started would have to fight it. There was substantial doubt even that the Guard's combat formations could be mobilized and sent to the theater in time to influence the action (it would take at least 45 days, by which time the war, we thought, would probably be over).

that because general war in Europe would be of extremely high tempo and intensity, the manufacturing base in the States would not be able to surge to capacity in time to send significant stocks of ammunition and other supplies to the theater. So whatever stocks we had on hand were the ones we would have fight with for probably the whole war.

I have in the past faulted the Bush administration - and still do - for trying to fight this war with little domestic effect. They have kept a peacetime-oriented economic policy while trying to fight a war that is requiring substantially more industrial capacity and sustainability than we began the war with.

Case in point: ammunition. For a long time last year and in 2002 there was a shortage of almost all types of munitions used for fighting a ground war. I wrote way back in May 2002 that war in Iraq would not occur until 2003; I stated several reasons but including the main one that a four-star general told me at the time:

Much earlier than [first quarter 2003] will not be feasible. Replenishment of munitions stocks and maintenance of naval and air systems is much needed because both were used up a lot to take down Afghanistan.

As for small arms, DOD operates only one small-arms plant; its capacity vice demand is so low that DOD began buying ammo from commercial manufacturers last January. It can be reasonably argued that the availability of civilian capacity represents a true surge capacity, just as it did in WW2, but the fact is that DOD didn't accurately forecast the ammo expenditures Afghanistan and Iraq would require, and fell short.

Last January DOD was able to produce only 80 armored Humvees per month, so we have enjoyed a fivefold increase since then, it must be noted. But: up armoring Humvees is not a high-technology enterprise; many units have been doing it in their maintenance shops.

There is a lot on the SecDef's plate and producing armored Humvees is one, but only one. I don't want his job and am reluctant to second-guess it. But I still think that this administration, from the Oval Office down, has been too reluctant to upset the domestic economy apple cart. It should have increased the military-industrial capacity substantially and early.

Proof: there is only one supplier for Humvee armor, Armor Holdings, Inc. (Smart money bought its stock today, btw.)

Armor Holdings Inc., the sole supplier of protective plates for the Humvee military vehicles used in Iraq, said it could increase output by as much as 22 percent per month with no investment and is awaiting an order from the Army.

So why is there only one supplier? Because DOD has thought since the invasion that the duration of combat operations in Iraq would be too short to justify surging capacity; after all, you might wind up reaching peak capacity just when you don't need it any more.

Well, yeah. So? The downside of that would be ... what?

3. The media reporting: By now everyone also probably knows that Spc. Wilson didn't just make his question up on his own. He agreed to act as a shill for Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter Edward Lee Pitts, who is embedded with the 278th RCT. The glee with which the media have, almost without exception, reported that Rumsfeld was put on the spot tends to reveal where the media's real interest lie, i.e., the Tennessean:

In baseball parlance, Spc. Thomas Jerry Wilson's question at an open forum with Donald Rumsfeld was a straight-down-the-middle, 95 mph fastball.

Rumsfeld never saw it coming.

The purpose of this kind of reporting is intended to nothing but vilify Donald Rumsfeld and the administration. Right now, there are 1,300-plus news stories about Rumsfeld's discomfiture listed on Google news. What percentage of them, now or in the future, do you think will examine the full picture of the nation's military industrial base and the funding stream either requested by the administration or voted by Congress? About zero, that's what. Edward Pitts probably already is writing his Pulitzer acceptance speech, since in co-opting Spc. Wilson he claims, "I just had one of my best days as a journalist today." Why is that? In the context of the rest of his words, his claim that lives will be saved rings pretty hollow.

Bottom line: it will be a long time before Rumsfeld stands in front of the troops like that again, and when he does the reporters will be kicking the dirt outside. And I think it's low of Wilson to have acted as a sock puppet for Pitts.

by Donald Sensing, 12/9/2004 04:52:27 PM. Permalink |