You go to war with the army you have, Rumsfeld tells angry soldiers

DISGRUNTLED US soldiers complained to Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld yesterday about the lack of armour for their vehicles and long deployments, drawing a blunt retort from the Pentagon chief.

“You go to war with the army you have,” he said in a rare public airing of rank-and-file concerns among the troops.

In his prepared remarks earlier, Rumsfeld had urged the troops (mostly National Guard and Reserve soldiers) to discount critics of the war in Iraq and to help “win the test of wills” with the insurgents.

Some of soldiers, however, had criticisms of their own, not of the war itself but of how it is being fought.

Army spc Thomas Wilson, for example, of the 278th Regimental Combat Team that is comprised mainly of citizen soldiers of the Tennessee Army National Guard, asked Rumsfeld in a question-and-answer session why vehicle armour is still in short supply, nearly two years after the start of the war.

“Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmour our vehicles?” Wilson asked. A big cheer arose from the approximately 2,300 soldiers in the cavernous hangar who assembled to see and hear the secretary of defence.

Rumsfeld hesitated and asked Wilson to repeat his question. “We do not have proper armoured vehicles to carry with us north,” Wilson said after asking again.

Rumsfeld replied that troops should make the best of the conditions they face and said the Army was pushing manufacturers of vehicle armour to produce it as fast as possible.

Meanwhile, insurgents launched a string of assaults around the city of Samarra, trading gunfire with US forces, attacking a US convoy, and blowing up a police station after looting its armoury, officials said.

The violence in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, killed four Iraqis and wounded several others.