Time for Rumsfeld to go.

George needs a legacy.

For all those who support Bush and how he is conducting the war in Iraq. Any change of heart.

Rumsfeld needs a theme song. Maybe Onward Christian solders would be appropriate.

what did rummy and his bosses think? that the insurgents (hah! what a piece of rhetoric..) were gonna "shoot at us with spitballs??"

For all those who support Bush and how he is conducting the war in Iraq. Any change of heart.
....

au1929 wrote:

For all those who support Bush and how he is conducting the war in Iraq. Any change of heart.

Rumsfeld needs a theme song. Maybe Onward Christian solders would be appropriate.

might be a good idea, au.. considering i just heard this morning that only 10-15% of the vehicles are armoured, it would appear that rummy is content to arm our kids with nothing but a prayer, in this case.

Armor supplier says it could boost output if Army asks for it. But they haven't.

Rummy's a lying sack of sh!t, but then we knew that.

Friday, December 10, 2004

Humvee makers dispute Rumsfeld remarks
More armored vehicles could readily be built, two companies say

By GEORGE EDMONSON
COX NEWS SERVICE

WASHINGTON -- The manufacturer of Humvees for the U.S. military and the company that adds armor to the utility vehicles are not running near production capacity and are making all that the Pentagon has requested, spokesmen for both companies said.

"If they call and say, 'You know, we really want more,' we'll get it done," said Lee Woodward, a spokesman for AM General, the Indiana company that makes Humvees and the civilian Hummer versions.

At O'Gara-Hess & Eisenhardt, the Ohio firm that turns specially designed Humvees into fully armored vehicles at a cost of about $70,000 each, spokesman Michael Fox said they, too, can provide more if the government wants them.

Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., said yesterday that the companies could increase production of armored Humvees from 450 a month to 550 by February.

Blaming the shortage on a lack of production capacity, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld did Wednesday, is "just not true," said Bayh. He said he had told the Pentagon as early as April that more armored Humvees could be built.

"It's essentially a matter of physics," Rumsfeld told the soldiers in his reply on Wednesday. "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."

But Bayh, in a telephone conference call with reporters, said the problem was another indication of the administration's underestimation of the risks and demands in Iraq.

"It borders on the naïve," Bayh added.


... The current monthly production level of armored Humvees is up from as few as 15 in the fall of 2003, said Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita.

According to Army figures, there are almost 19,400 Humvees operating in the Iraq theater. Of those, about 5,900 were armored at the factory and armor was added to about 9,100 of them later.

Other vehicles also lack armor. The House Armed Services Committee released statistics yesterday showing that most transport trucks crisscrossing Iraq to supply the troops don't have armor. Only 10 percent of the 4,814 medium-weight transport trucks have armor, and only 15 percent of the 4,314 heavy transport vehicles do.

The Humvee name comes from the pronunciation of the abbreviation of its prosaic military title: High Mobility Multi-Purpose Wheeled Vehicle -- HMMWV.

Woodward said AM General -- a descendant of American Motors that once built Rambler automobiles -- has added workers and increased overtime to meet demand.

The number of large Hummers, which share part of the assembly line with Humvees, has been reduced to a level that has no impact on Humvee production, Woodward said. The smaller Hummer SUV is built in a separate building, he added.

Woodward would not detail AM General's current monthly Humvee production figures.

The Humvees to be factory-armored by O'Gara-Hess have some different specifications than the models shipped without armor, Woodward said. So increasing production requires careful planning.

"It's not like making a Big Mac," he said. "There are so many configurations. ... You can't just whip them through like a big grill in a McDonald's."

Besides having increased the number of Humvees it is receiving, the military is also shifting armored ones to Iraq from other areas, including the United States and the Balkans. An Army fact sheet said 282 factory-armored Humvees are on ships headed to Iraq.

And 10 sites have been established, two in Kuwait and eight in Iraq, where armor is added to Humvees, Lt. Gen. Steven Whitcomb told Pentagon reporters yesterday in a teleconference from Kuwait. According to the Army information, 9,134 of 9,386 add-on armor kits in the Iraq theater have been installed.

Whitcomb said the factory-installed armor provides protection that he described as "a bubble." Add-on armor does not protect the Humvee's top and bottom, he added.

In Iraq, the need for more armored Humvees came to the fore in August 2003 when insurgents changed tactics and started using roadside bombs, Whitcomb said.

"What we also can't lose sight of is that the Humvee was a vehicle that was not designed to afford armor protection, nor were most of our trucks, he said. "The only (factory-armored) Humvees -- the high-end ones -- we had were for our military police forces."

The P-I Washington Bureau contributed to this report.

DontTreadOnMe wrote:

what did rummy and his bosses think? that the insurgents (hah! what a piece of rhetoric..) were gonna "shoot at us with spitballs??"

I'm just slow enough to not grasp the point you are trying to make in the bolded text. Care to elaborate?

I had heard the 10-15% figure attached to light trucks, not the Hummers, which was more like 75%. Did I hear wrong?

not sure you heard wrong... just repeating what i heard on the news. either way, to have anything rolling around over there without the hard stuff is not really a terrific idea.

Specialist Thomas Wilson: "Our vehicles are not armored. We are digging up pieces of rusting scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass that has already been shot up, dropped, busted, picking the best for our vehicles to take into combat."

Rumsfeld: "Now, settle down, settle down... Hell, I'm an old man, it's early in the morning and I'm gathering my thoughts here... You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time."

Details of torture coverup

A veteran sergeant who told his commanding officers that he witnessed his colleagues torturing Iraqi detainees was strapped to a gurney and flown out of Iraq -- even though there was nothing wrong with him.

David DeBatto
Salon.com
December 8, 2004

On June 15, 2003, Sgt. Frank "Greg" Ford, a counterintelligence agent in the California National Guard's 223rd Military Intelligence (M.I.) Battalion stationed in Samarra, Iraq, told his commanding officer, Capt. Victor Artiga, that he had witnessed five incidents of torture and abuse of Iraqi detainees at his base, and requested a formal investigation. Thirty-six hours later, Ford, a 49-year-old with over 30 years of military service in the Coast Guard, Army and Navy, was ordered by U.S. Army medical personnel to lie down on a gurney, was then strapped down, loaded onto a military plane and medevac'd to a military medical center outside the country.

Although no "medevac" order appears to have been written, in violation of Army policy, Ford was clearly shipped out because of a diagnosis that he was suffering from combat stress. After Ford raised the torture allegations, Artiga immediately said Ford was "delusional" and ordered a psychiatric examination, according to Ford. But that examination, carried out by an Army psychiatrist, diagnosed him as "completely normal."

A witness, Sgt. 1st Class Michael Marciello, claims that Artiga became enraged when he read the initial medical report finding nothing wrong with Ford and intimidated the psychiatrist into changing it. According to Marciello, Artiga angrily told the psychiatrist that it was a "C.I. [counterintelligence] or M.I. matter" and insisted that she had to change her report and get Ford out of Iraq.

Documents show that all subsequent examinations of Ford by Army mental-health professionals, over many months, confirmed his initial diagnosis as normal.

...

Quote:

Rumsfeld: "Now, settle down, settle down... Hell, I'm an old man, it's early in the morning and I'm gathering my thoughts here...

these guys cop out every time.

Given the treatment of the first people who reported the abuses at Abu Ghraib, I've gotta say that I think Specialist Wilson is very daring.

Norman Schwarzkopf said yesterday he was "angry" at Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's response to a soldier who complained he and his fellow grunts in Iraq lack sufficient armor plating.

...

After a soldier told Rumsfeld that he and his fellow servicemen must scrounge for metal to better fortify their Humvees, the secretary told him, "You go to war with the Army you have." That response didn't sit well with the former general.

"They deserve every bit of protection we can give them," Schwarzkopf scowled in an interview with "Hardball" host Chris Matthews on MSNBC. "I was very, very disappointed - let me put it stronger - I was angry by the words of the secrtary of the defense."

More than half of the more than 1,200 U.S. troops killed in Iraq have come from insurgent attacks on the vehicles.

"When he [Rumsfeld] laid it all on the Army, I mean, as if he as the secretary of defense didn't have anything to do with it, the Army was over there doing it themselves screwing up," Schwarzkopf said.

"I have force protection questions, sir," said a soldier whose name was not identified in a Pentagon transcript of the May 13 town hall meeting.

"You have what?" asked Rumsfeld.

"Force protection," the unknown soldier repeated.

Rumsfeld turned to Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his companion on the Baghdad trip. "General Myers," he said, amid laughter, leaving the general to deal with whatever touchy topics the soldier might raise.

The soldier stumbled and mumbled in his question but the meaning was plain enough: "Sir, my unit, the 2nd Brigade -- (inaudible) -- Cav[alry], we have five out of the six red zones in this country. And with the up-armored Humvees, the new -- (off mike) -- Humvees they're bringing over with the -- (inaudible) -- those doors are not as good as the ones on the up-armored Humvees (inaudible). We even lost quite -- we lost some soldiers due to them, and we're trying to make a change -- (inaudible). The question is, are we going to get more up-armored Humvees?"

In other words, his cavalry unit was going into dangerous places, he had seen his comrades die when their unarmored vehicles were blasted, and he was hoping that more of the better-protected Humvees would be arriving soon. He also asked about vests with protective ceramic plates, which were in similar short supply.

Rumsfeld remained silent, while Myers replied with the kind of uplifting rhetoric that has made enlisted men distrust general officers from the dawn of armed conflict.

"Good points. Excellent points," he said. "You can imagine we spend a lot of time on force protection, and our responsibility, I think, is to ensure we have the resources and protection lines and all that cranked up to get the equipment we need."

Myers continued, telling the soldiers what they already knew: "You do not have all the up-armored Humvees you need. You got about -- around 3,000 out of the 4,400 roughly that they want over here, that your leaders want. Production is ramping up this month. I think it's around 220, 225 per month ... We're trying to get them to you as fast as we can. We understand the difference they can make, and for that matter we're shipping some armor over as well."

That was all well and good -- except that seven months later, of course, American troops in Iraq still don't have the armored transportation they need.