[Mb-civic] EDITORIAL U.S. Troops' Other Struggle LATimes

[Michael Butler]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-iraq19oct19.story

EDITORIAL

U.S. Troops' Other Struggle

 October 19, 2004

 With metronomic regularity, President Bush declares that he has given and
will give the U.S. military everything it needs to fight Iraqi insurgents.
But the evidence is mounting that the administration, to borrow a famous
Bush word, not only misunderestimated the number of troops required but is
even now failing to properly equip the ones that are in Iraq.

 A Times report today details continued nagging shortages of such critical
items as helicopter parts and vehicle armor. And Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S.
Sanchez, the top commander in Iraq from mid-2003 until this summer, warned
the Pentagon in a brutally frank Dec. 4, 2003, letter that a lack of spare
parts was crippling his ability to fight the insurgents: "I cannot continue
to support sustained combat operations with rates [of parts] this low," he
said in excerpts published Monday in the Washington Post. The general
declines to comment, and the Pentagon says that, almost a year later, all is
well.

 No, it's not, particularly among National Guard and Reserve units. As an
apparent insubordination by 18 men and women from the 343rd Quartermaster
Company based in South Carolina revealed, the administration is demanding
that the former "weekend warriors" perform the duties of regular troops but
isn't providing the means to execute them. That, if the soldiers' complaints
are correct, includes armored and mechanically sound trucks as well as
sufficient combat infantry escorts for supply convoys.

 Although the military has improved in equipping soldiers with body armor,
it still struggles to stay even with an insurgency that has become
increasingly sophisticated and lethal.

 In the presidential campaign, Bush regularly excoriates Sen. John F. Kerry
for voting against an $87-billion supplemental war appropriation last year,
a vote that Kerry has struggled to defend. But the measure passed, and the
shoddiness and lack of backup that drove the Guard members to refuse their
supply mission ‹ knowing that they risked their careers and freedom in doing
so ‹ are not Kerry's fault.

 Even the military, whose very structure is threatened by any
insubordination in a war zone, is implicitly acknowledging the accuracy of
the complaints and is treating the Guard members with kid gloves.

 The level of refusal is far from what it was at the height of the Vietnam
War. As Col. Robert D. Heinl Jr. wrote in the Armed Forces Journal in 1971
in a widely reprinted article, "Our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a
state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused
combat, murdering their officers and noncommissioned officers, drug-ridden
and dispirited where not near mutinous."

 The South Carolina Guard members' refusal to man a fuel convoy seems
downright polite compared with that. But the complaints are representative
of what other troops face, and reports from the field underscore their
validity.


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