Supporting our troops in the modern age

I don’t know how our leaders, especially our military leaders, can look in the mirror every morning. That is, if two recent stories are true; and I have little reason to doubt that they are not true.

Yesterday’s NY Times spoke of a company of Marines that was inadequately armed and inadequately staffed. The very word ‘inadequately’ is itself inadequate to describe the failure of our government to properly supply our husbands and wives, sons and daughters with the tools they need to protect themselves as much as is possible in war time. Lord, can you imagine being in Company E which in six months last year had one-third of their number killed or wounded not because they were poor soldiers but because we did not have sufficient armor for their Humvees?

And it’s not much better today. Two years into this war the Army still relies on one small contractor to armor-clad the Humvees for all the armed services. Things have gotten so bad that the Marines have decided to take care of their own 2800+ Humvees in Iraq and have started a crash program to do so.

Not only did these Marines not have armor to protect themselves, their maps were woefully out of date and they had very few electronic devices to detect and block the homemade bombs that have killed so many. Or, how about using cardboard cutouts and camouflage shirts to create the illusion that you had more troops than you did? This for the troops of America, the world’s superpower!

Today’s Boston Globe also talks of the lack of troops, but it also describes the lack of training for the troops who have served and are serving us in Iraq. Because of the limited number of Army troops, people from the Air Force and Navy have been dragooned into such tasks as guarding convoys (perhaps the most dangerous task in Iraq today) and oil depots, defusing bombs under fire, driving trucks, and other tasks you would not normally expect them to do. And they’re doing these tasks with very little training, sometimes as little as one week, whereas a regular army soldier receives months of training.

Perhaps, these things would not have happened under the generals that were moved out of leadership positions a couple of years ago because they disagreed with Rumsfeld and other wise people.

What will we learn tomorrow?