Daily Blague

We've been hearing from soldiers and their families that that our forces in Iraq don't have the armor that they need. Last December, Secretary Rumsfeld blithely dismissed - well, blithely for him - these complaints as so much wrongheaded sense of entitlement. You fight the war with the army you've got, he quipped, in words to that effect. But "the army you've got" is not a fact of nature. On the contrary. It is the result of decisions large and small, some of them quite mistaken.

The war in Iraq was hardly a month old in April 2003 when an Army general in charge of equipping soldiers with protective gear threw the brakes on buying bulletproof vests.

The general, Richard A. Cody, who led a Pentagon group called the Army Strategic Planning Board, had been told by supply chiefs that the combat troops already had all the armor they needed, according to Army officials and records from the board's meetings. Some 50,000 other American soldiers, who were not on the front lines of battle, could do without.

That's from Michael Moss's front-page story in today's Times, "Many Missteps Tied to Delay in Armor for Troops in Iraq." Wishful thinking in Washington projected a traditional war of front lines and battles, and this, indeed, was what the march to Baghdad mostly was. But having reached the capital - "Mission Accomplished" - the military faced an altogether different enemy, an enemy that it has been all but powerless to check. The only thing that surprises me is that the replacement of Saddam Hussein's army by terrorist insurgents surprised the Pentagon. In any case, fighting insurgents means, first and foremost, throwing "battles" and "front lines" out the window: every soldier in a terror-inflected war is serving on the front, and the battle is non-stop. But "the army you've got" was now in the hands of comfortable uniformed executives far from the blood and dust.

But an examination of the issues involving the protective shielding and other critical equipment shows how a supply problem seen as an emergency on the ground in Iraq was treated as a routine procurement matter back in Washington.

The Secretary of Defense is mentioned only twice in Mr Moss's story, first in connection with his atrocious response to soldiers in December, the second in a reference to the resignation of Thomas E White, the Secretary of the Army who resigned, according to Mr Moss, "after a falling out with Mr Rumsfeld" in April, 2003. Funny, I thought that Mr White's Enron background had something to do with that resignation, but no matter, no matter. Mr Rumsfeld was on my mind in every paragraph of the story; I was stuck, as it were, on the "supply chiefs" who had told General Cody that soldiers who weren't in the "front lines of battle" could "do without." Could these be officers who survived the Army purge that Seymour M Hersh exposed two years ago, in an article that I hope The New Yorker will maintain on-line until our Iraqi misadventure is over, "Offense and Defense"?

Gradually, Rumsfeld succeeded in replacing those officers in senior Joint Staff positions who challenged his view. “All the Joint Staff people now are handpicked, and churn out products to make the Secretary of Defense happy,” the planner said. “They don’t make military judgments—they just respond to his snowflakes.”

As always with the mess in Iraq, we come back to the TPFDL - the "time-phased, forces-deployment list," and Mr Rumsfeld's contempt for this painstaking distillation of military experience. Sticking to the "tip-fiddle" would certainly not have saved every soldier's life. But General Cody might have been able to rely on more trustworthy supply chiefs.

Memo to Robert H Scales: Prepare to be branded for aiding and abetting the enemy!

"This is a new age in war with an enemy that adapts faster than we do," said Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., retired, a former head of the Army War College. "Al Qaeda doesn't have to go to the Board of Accountability in order to develop a new roadside bomb or triggering device."

Why do I bother to write this out? Because one can't do enough to demonstrate that the Administration's radical wishful thinking is the real menace facing our troops in Iraq.