WASHINGTON — Anxious troops awaiting deployment to Iraq peppered Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld with questions Wednesday during his brief visit to their camp in the Kuwaiti desert, demanding to know why U.S. forces were still being sent with insufficient protection against deadly insurgents.
Rumsfeld, who invited "tough questions," got what he asked for when a number of the troops took him to task for the poor condition of the equipment given to the National Guard and for the Pentagon's "stop-loss" policy that had kept thousands of troops on active duty beyond their discharge dates.
During the meeting at Camp Buehring, one soldier asked Rumsfeld why some troops had to rummage through local landfills for scraps to armor their vehicles.
"Our vehicles are not armored. We're digging pieces of rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass ... to put on our vehicles to take into combat," said one Iraq-bound soldier, whom Associated Press identified as Spc. Thomas Wilson of the Tennessee National Guard.
"We do not have proper armored vehicles to carry with us north," Wilson said as comrades cheered his question.
Rumsfeld responded that the Pentagon had taken steps to equip soldiers being sent to Iraq, but that factory production was limited. "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."
The insurgency in Iraq, Rumsfeld said, has forced the Pentagon to shift its priorities toward outfitting every vehicle in Iraq with proper armor, something planners had not seen as a necessary expense before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.
"As you know, you go to war with the army you have," Rumsfeld said. "They're not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time."
Rumsfeld frequently meets with troops when he visits combat zones, and he has faced questioning before from soldiers on matters such as delinquent pay and the length of deployments. But Wednesday's session was somewhat more combative than previous meetings and reflected soldiers' anxiety, particularly about their equipment.
Pentagon planners and supply experts have acknowledged that the failure to anticipate a sustained insurgency resulted in shortages of necessary equipment. The troops Wednesday pressed Rumsfeld for solutions.
