Prometheus 6

Rumsfeld's exchange with the troops

MARK SHIELDS: Jim, you remember John Kerry's answer on the $87 bill appropriation: First I voted for it then I voted against it?

JIM LEHRER: I do remember that.

MARK SHIELDS: Okay. I think John Kerry does, too. As you know, you go to war not with the army you might wish to have but with the army you have -- might want to have at a future date. This war, Donald Rumsfeld knows and the president knows and everybody else knows, was not in response to firing at Fort Sumter or the invasion across the 38th Parallel in Korea or Pearl Harbor.

This was a war of the timing and location of which was totally a choice of the administration. They'd been planning it, according to Bob Woodward, from September 2001. The idea that today barely over half of American military vehicles in Iraq are armored when one half of all the people you saw listed first at the head of the show, almost 1300 dead Americans, close to 10,000 wounded, one half of them have been wounded by improvised explosive devices, all right, but set off first by a radio signal, a phone signal, and the only thing that stops them are two: One is armor and two is a radio scanner.

MARK SHIELDS: Every VIP who goes over there, as Gene Taylor, Congressman from Mississippi points out, when he goes over, anybody goes over, whether it's a VIP or a cabinet officer or a CEO, or whatever, they are surrounded by armor. Every vehicle has its own radio scanner so that they can disable those improvised explosive devices. Our soldiers and marines don't have that. And it's just... it's a terribly serious indictment at this point in this war that Americans are scavenging as this fellow put it, to find the armor.

JIM LEHRER: A terribly serious indictment, David?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, to some extent, we trained, the army moves with a doctrine. The doctrine was "fast, mobile, high tech, get where you need to go" preparing for a certain sort of war. The insurgents found a flaw in what we had. They... once you're stuck there, you're not moving quickly to fight a lightning strike, you're stuck in urban warfare. We were not prepared obviously for this kind of warfare and so we didn't have the armor, we didn't have the heavy armor. They're producing it as fast as they can. There's no question it's a mistake.

As for Rumsfeld's... you know, the press conference, a couple things. First of off, I thought it was great. I thought it was great they addressed him way that way, they had a confrontation. You know, I'm sure he wish he'd given a different answer. You give the answer you have, not the answer you wish you had. But, you know, he's a confident guy and sometimes he errs on the side of confidence.

…MARK SHIELDS: Yeah, Jim, just one point. We're not producing it as fast as we can. The companies are not working at full capacity. The Congress has authorized basically a blank check for all the armor necessary to armor all our vehicles there. We've got 29,000 vehicles. Barely half of them are armored up today.

So when they go out, it's a roulette they're playing. And the idea that we're not is just indefensible. I'll tell you very bluntly. If they were the sons of senators and the sons of cabinet officers and the sons of CEO's, the sons of syndicated columnists who were there instead of kids from Tennessee and small towns in Oklahoma, you better believe they'd be armored up.