Armor for the Troops

National Review Online looks at the situation behind yesterday's famous question to Don Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld had a few issues to deal with before he could get armored Humvees to the troops. First of all, he inherited an army in love with big weapons systems.

the army was hell-bent on building the Crusader, a "mobile" artillery system that couldn't even fit into a C-130 transport plane. It wanted to build the Comanche helicopter, an aircraft conceived in 1983 with our Soviet adversary in mind. The army was caught in a bad Cold War flashback. As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year, "Even as the armored Humvee proved itself in small conflicts around the globe, the Army failed to buy more because it was focused on preparing for major wars with other large armies — rather than low-end guerrilla conflicts."

The need for armored vehicles is also rather new.

But in considering today's conventional wisdom, it is always useful to remember yesterday's. Before the roadside bombs really took hold as the Iraqi insurgents' weapon of choice, commentators were praising the British in Iraq for their unthreatening approach that emphasized soft vehicles and foot patrols. The Pentagon was criticized for its attachment to armor, not for having too little of it.

So what do we do now?

Some combination of the contractors' manufacturing capacity, the congressional-funding process, and the complexity of the military's contracting system are responsible. We wish the Pentagon leadership had more vigorously applied its creativity to this problem. Of course, it is not impossible to imagine, had, say, the contracting process been short-circuited, a hue-and-cry going up about some company's "sweetheart deal" to produce Humvees. And perhaps reporters would now be attempting to get soldiers to ask Rumsfeld about that.

"Sweetheart deals." Can you say "Halliburton"? A lot of the trouble seems to arise from the government procurement system.