The Hindu : International : Troops grill Rumsfeld on safety

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Thursday, Dec 09, 2004

International

International

Troops grill Rumsfeld on safety

CAMP BUEHRING (KUWAIT), DEC. 8. After delivering a pep talk designed to energise troops preparing to head for Iraq, the U.S. Defence Secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, got a little ``talking to'' himself from disgruntled soldiers.

In his prepared remarks, Mr. Rumsfeld urged the troops — mostly National Guard and Reserve soldiers — to discount critics of the war and to help ``win the test of wills'' with the militants.

Some soldiers had criticism of their own — not of the war itself but of how it is being fought. Army Spc. Thomas Wilson asked Mr. Rumsfeld why vehicle armour was still in short supply, nearly three years after 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?'' he asked. A big cheer arose from the approximately 2,300 soldiers in the cavernous hangar.

Priority

Mr. Rumsfeld said, ``You go to war with the Army you have,'' not the one you might want, and that any rate the Army was pushing manufacturers of vehicle armour to produce it as fast as possible.

He said armour was not always a saviour in the kind of combat the U.S. troops faced in Iraq, where the militants' weapon of choice was the roadside bomb, or improvised explosive device that killed and maimed hundreds, if not thousands, of American troops since the summer of 2003.

Another soldier complained that active-duty Army units sometimes got priority over the National Guard and Reserve units for the best equipment in Iraq.

``There's no way I can prove it, but I am told the Army is breaking its neck to see that there is not'' such discrimination, Mr. Rumsfeld said. Yet another soldier asked, without putting it to Mr. Rumsfeld as a direct criticism, how much longer the Army would continue using its ``stop loss'' power to prevent soldiers from leaving the service who are otherwise eligible to retire or quit. Mr. Rumsfeld said that this condition was simply a fact of life for soldiers at time of war.

``It's basically a sound principle, it's nothing new, it's been well understood'' by soldiers, he said.

``My guess is it will continue to be used as little as possible, but that it will continue to be used.'' — AP

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