Adaptability as a court-martial offense?(Insider Report)

"(Y]ou go to war with the Army you have ... not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." So spoke Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during a December 8 "town meeting" with Iraq-bound troops in Kuwait. Rumsfeld's delphic pronouncement was offered in response to a pointed question posed by Specialist Thomas Wilson, a scout with the Tennessee National Guard: "We've had troops in Iraq for coming up on three years and we've always staged here out of Kuwait. Now why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles and why don't we have those resources readily available to us?"

Some Bush-aligned "conservative" media sought to misdirect public attention from the outrageous situation described by Wilson by focusing on the fact that his question had been "planted" by an embedded newspaper reporter. But the reporter certainly didn't "plant" the enthusiastic response of the assembled soldiers to Wilson's question, which potently described a significant source of frustration for our overstretched, under-equipped troops.

Shocking as it may seem, the Pentagon has actually punished troops for trying to "up-armor" their vehicles without authorization.

"At a time when some U.S. troops are complaining they have to scrounge for equipment, six Ohio-based reservists were court-martialed for taking Army vehicles abandoned in Kuwait by ...