Editorial-

From Ancient Rome to ‘Modern’ Baghdad,
The Demanding Lessons Of War Are The Same

By William Finucane

When he started out to defend and expand the Roman Empire, the foot soldier of the time was a mighty fighter, mostly because he was well supplied and had all the accoutrements needed for battle.

Later, when the Visigoths and their like took aim at Rome and the borders of its empire, the Roman soldiers were far less prepared. Supplies, arms, even protective armor were all in short supply. And what was available was often of inferior quality.

Rome, at the end of her Empire, did not even try to train soldiers. Rome simply asked barbarian fighters to come, with their own army and all, to help the Empire. Rome’s army eventually withered and effectively died.

The corollary with America today is easy to draw; today America is supposedly defending democracy while appearing to expand its empire, and the United States armed services are suffering many of the very same problems that Roman soldiers faced a few centuries ago. The great irony, and perhaps the major unanswered question, is why equipment and supply problems should be an issue for the American foot soldier when hundreds of billions of dollars is being spent on defense appropriations. Disturbingly, protection for many, if not most, U.S. soldiers is woefully slim.

Orders not withstanding, for many U.S. Army personnel the only way to get basic protection is to find it and take it. That is the physics of protection. Find your own.

It was under this cloud of shaky personnel safety that freshly re-appointed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld went defensive himself. He flew to Kuwait to give the men and women of the services a pep talk.

But his comments quickly became truly irrelevant as soon as the open question period began. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld got both barrels of enlisted unhappiness.

At Camp Buehring, where he spoke to Reservists and National Guardsmen, Rumsfeld was broad-sided, perhaps even blind-sided, since while he has let servicemen and women question him in such get-togethers before, this was the first time he was subjected to pointed, hard questions.

Here’s one example: Tennessee Army National Guardsman Specialist Thomas Wilson wanted to know why his unit has Humvees that lack adequate armor?

Albeit, Wilson’s question had been suggested to him by reporter Edward Lee Pitts, of the Chattanooga Times Free Press. Reporter Pitts was ‘embedded’ with the troops, but prevented from posing questions himself in that venue. Perhaps the Pentagon and the White House were afraid that journalists like Pitts might ask such hard questions, and assumed the soldiers would not dare to speak up.

But clearly they underestimated the citizen-soldiers, especially those who are not committed to a career in the professional army, but are reservists with a life outside of the military. Specialist Wilson might have been given the idea by Pitts, but he himself chose to act on the suggestion and ask the question in his own words.

Conservatives have dismissed the whole matter as a piece of stagecraft, and while they should certainly know stagecraft when they see it, since they practice it all the time, they seem to have been blinded by their own cynicism; that is, they assumed it must be a plot of some kind because that is what they would have done if the situation was reversed.

And of course that cynical view was enhanced by the silly, boastful and in the end unprofessional behavior of Mr. Pitts, who apparently thinks he scored big-time as a reporter and fails to recognize that he should be grateful that an American soldier took his suggestion to heart and acted upon it, thereby bringing forward a response that fueled further discussion. Mr. Pitts' personal story is very, very ancillary to the question and its answer, but by puffing himself up, Mr. Pitts has played into the hands of those who would discount the entire episode.

Nonetheless, the question posed by Specialist Wilson, and the answer from Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, cannot be easily dismissed or diminished.

Wilson drew widespread support from his fellow soldiers when he asked the question. This was clearly a subject that was on every soldier’s mind.

And Rumsfeld reeled.

"Now settle down, settle down," said the Defense Secretary. "Hell, I’m an old man. It’s early in the morning."

Ah, there we are, Secretary Rumsfeld is old, tired and cannot think militarily early in the morning. But that was not the answer the American soldiers wanted.

As Spc. Wilson noted, "We’re digging (up) pieces of rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass that’s already been shot up, dropped, busted; (we're) picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles to take into combat."

The key word here is "combat."

Combat is what these American soldiers have now, all the time and in every direction; a war of insurgency, where an empty highway can be a booby-trapped battleground and the enemy often remains out of range, out of the way of any organized response. It is a hit and run war that no one wants to admit is increasingly reminiscent of the Vietnam experience.

Apparently Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Bush and company actually acted on a presumption that Americans would be welcomed as liberators. So nobody thought Humvees and other vehicles would need armor to protect against high-powered bombs and roadside booby-traps. Of course, that begs the traditionally unanswered question; that is, why weren’t these expensive military vehicles armored from the time they were first ordered? Why are so many of them essentially the same as the domestic version available in showrooms; that is, a multi-purpose vehicle that can go where no road exists but can be easily penetrated by a pistol bullet, let alone an assault rifle or a grenade?

Imagine what a half-pound of C-4 explosive could do to one of the fancy Hummer’s so often now seen on American highways? Once that is imagined, the problem facing the troops becomes clear.

Now we all know better. We’ve collectively dropped the ball! But who had the responsibility for the ball? It was in the hands of our elected officials and their appointees, and also in the hands of our professionals in the Pentagon. We allow them to act on our behalf, and use billions of dollars in the process, and this is what they provided. They have a reason to be nervous about how much we begin to understand. They haven’t handled the ball very well.

When you are a soldier assigned to move troops, or food, or fuel, or whatever cargo there is to be moved, you want some protection from your vehicle. You have a right to assume your military vehicle will be equipped and qualified for the task that it must accomplish. Otherwise, you are a sitting duck.

It doesn’t matter whether you are alone in the vehicle, or whether there is a small crew or even twenty or more soldier-passengers moving to a new location, if the vehicle is largely the same as a civilian vehicle everyone is a target.

Soldiers driving or riding in vehicles are not in any way ready to counterattack. Such servicemen and women are sitting in a small space, largely helpless. Helpless, that is, except for the armor that has been added to the truck or Humvee to make it battle-ready. The reality that American soldiers must put together their own armor when the nation has invested some $100 billion dollars in the war effort is the deepest condemnation that could be laid at the doorstep of this Republican administration.

This is a reprehensible fact.

It is underscored by the truth that if soldiers have no armor in their vehicles, they are in death traps every time they use them for transport.

It is just that simple.

Rumsfeld gave his physics lesson, pointing out that armored Humvees are being built as fast as is possible. Can’t get any more of them. Takes time. Be patient. Mr. Rumsfeld explains it this way: "You have to fight a war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had…"

There is some doubt here.

Some say manufacturers could up their production by 22 percent. Others say no. But WWII production gives the lie to the nay-sayers. With about half the population, and a much-reduced GNP, America out produced the world in armaments more than 60 years ago.  Now, with billions of available cash the Pentagon can’t seem to take an interest in the foot soldiers.

Why is it that two bank robbers in California can adorn themselves with full body armor, apparently flexible Kevlar, and endure a lengthy direct gun battle with dozens of police, taking numerous hits without serious injury, and yet the billions and billions of dollars American taxpayers spend cannot give their uniformed children the same protection?

But such important questions seem arcane to the soldiers in uniform. What they care about is the immediate possibility of getting killed by small arms fire, road bombs and the like. Armored Humvees and other military vehicles would protect them.

If the vehicles were armored, the soldiers could expect to live to fight against the enemy. And they would willingly do so.

It is quite simple: Americans are being sacrificed for lack of armor, not a stronger enemy. And the vehicles are supposed to be armored.

Soldiers are not demanding some fancy new armament. They just want what is supposed to be there. Sort of like the late era of the Roman Empire.

Before all of this boiled up because of a well publicized press conference, there had been many soldiers complaining about body armor. In fact, a number of soldiers organized efforts to have armor bought in the states and sent over by family and friends.

That surely is not how Americans are supposed to protect their soldiers – having the family and friends ship them armor!

And what about the Ohio soldiers found guilty of taking armor off abandoned US vehicles to suit out their own working vehicles?

Pentagon rules say soldiers cannot do that. This is unabashed stupidity, but it gets worse. The Pentagon court-martialed the six reservists from Ohio who had dared to take such an entrepreneurial approach and cannibalized defunct equipment to enhance the armor of the vehicles still in use.

But the irony doesn’t end there. How twisted everything in the system is was later illustrated by the fact that the military declared it would not court-martial  23 soldiers who would not transport fuel on a dangerous road in Iraq. The trucks were in bad condition and lacked armor, the soldiers said, and they refused to report for duty.

So apparently the new and supple military regulations indicate you don’t get tried for refusing to do your duty because your vehicles are under-armored, but you do get tried if you intend to do your duty by trying to improve your working vehicle at the expense of abandoned US vehicles. Those junk vehicles must be important

Well, then, glad we’ve cleared up all of that business.

Not surprisingly, the Pentagon spokespeople say the problems are nowhere near as bad as the soldiers imply. But the fact remains, each soldier should have the armor he or she needs, and they don’t have such equipment. After all, isn’t the U.S. Army fond of saying, in its television commercials, that the US Army is really an Army of one? One what? One citizen in uniform that is undervalued by the Pentagon and the Bush Administration in the allocation of the billions of tax dollars spent on the ‘war effort?’

A soldier who must rely on traveling in unarmored Humvee must have truly been moved by hearing Defense Secretary Rumsfeld incoherently babble about the physics involved, coupled with remarks about how the army one has is perhaps not the army one wishes to have. How comforting that is for the soldier, his family, and all the average Americans who stand behind them, providing tax dollars for the Pentagon and the Bush Administration to use. Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld should be ashamed.