We use scrap for armour, troops tell Rumsfeld

Disgruntled American soldiers complained to US Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday about the lack of armour for their vehicles and long deployments, drawing a blunt retort from the Pentagon chief.

"You go to war with the army you have," he said in a rare public airing of rank-and-file concerns among the troops.

In his prepared remarks earlier, Rumsfeld had urged the troops - mostly National Guard and Reserve soldiers - to discount critics of the war in Iraq and to help "win the test of wills" with the insurgents.

Some soldiers, however, had criticisms of their own - not of the war itself but of how it is being fought.

Army Specialist Thomas Wilson, for example, of the 278th Regimental Combat Team that comprises mainly citizen soldiers of the Tennessee Army National Guard, asked Rumsfeld in a question-and-answer session why vehicle armour is still in short supply nearly three years after the war in Iraq began.

"Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armour our vehicles?" Wilson asked. A big cheer arose from the approximately 2,300 soldiers in the cavernous hangar who assembled to see and hear the secretary of defence.

Rumsfeld hesitated and asked Wilson to repeat his question. "We do not have proper armoured vehicles to carry with us north," Wilson responded.

Rumsfeld replied that "you go to war with the Army you have," not the one you might want, and that at any rate the Army was pushing manufacturers of vehicle armour to produce it as fast as humanly possible.

And, the defence chief added, armour is not always a saviour in the kind of combat US troops face in Iraq, where the insurgents' weapon of choice is the roadside bomb, or improvised explosive device that has killed and maimed hundreds, if not thousands, of American troops.