Rumsfeld quizzed on armor shortage

CAMP BUEHRING, Kuwait -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld came here on Wednesday to lead a morale-lifting town hall discussion with Iraq-bound troops. Instead, he found himself on the defensive, fielding pointed questions from soldiers complaining about aging vehicles that lacked armor for protection against roadside bombs.

Rumsfeld, seemingly caught off guard by the sharp questioning, responded that the military was producing extra armor for Humvees and trucks as fast as possible, but that the soldiers would have to cope with equipment shortages. "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time," he said.

Spc. Thomas Wilson, a scout with a Tennessee National Guard unit scheduled to roll into Iraq this week, was the first to step forward, saying that soldiers had to scrounge through local landfills here for pieces of rusty scrap metal and bulletproof glass -- what they called "hillbilly armor" -- to bolt to their trucks.

"Why don't we have those resources readily available to us?" Wilson asked Rumsfeld, drawing cheers and applause from many of the 2,300 soldiers assembled in a cavernous hangar here to meet the secretary.

A few minutes later, a soldier from the Idaho National Guard's 116th Armor Cavalry Brigade asked Rumsfeld what he and the Army were doing "to address shortages and antiquated equipment" that will affect National Guard soldiers heading to Iraq.

Rumsfeld seemed taken aback by the question and a murmur began spreading through the ranks before he silenced it. "Now, settle down, settle down," he said. "Hell, I'm an old man, it's early in the morning, and I'm gathering my thoughts here."

Rumsfeld, 72, said all organizations had equipment, materials, and spare parts of different vintages, but he expressed confidence that Army leaders were assigning the newest and best equipment to the troops headed for combat who needed it most.

The Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, speaking in Washington on Wednesday after the Kuwait session, said that the military is now producing 450 armored Humvees a month, compared with just 15 a month in the fall of 2003, when the threat of roadside bombs began to emerge. He also said that three out of four Humvees in the war zones are armored, and that unarmored vehicles are used in back-up operations, inside bases.

It was difficult to gauge the scope and seriousness of the equipment problems cited by the two soldiers and by several others in interviews after Rumsfeld's appearance. A senior officer in Wilson's unit, Col. John Zimmerman, said later that 95 percent of the unit's more than 300 trucks had insufficient armor.

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