How Safe Are Our Troops?

By Mark Thompson/Washington

Among Washington elites, Donald Rumsfeld is the undisputed master of the press conference: a dexterous debater who undresses interrogators with a mix of septuagenarian folksiness and alpha-male swagger. That skill has helped Rumsfeld deflect blame for the mismanagement of the U.S. occupation of Iraq and keep his job as Defense Secretary for George W. Bush's second term. But when Rumsfeld fielded questions last week from soldiers preparing to move from Kuwait into Iraq, he finally met his match. Army Specialist Thomas Wilson, 31, asked the Secretary why soldiers are being sent to war in humvees and trucks so vulnerable that troops must forage for "rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass that's already been shot up, dropped, busted, picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles to take into combat." Many of Wilson's 2,300 comrades in the hangar were applauding in agreement.

Wilson, it turns out, had crafted the question with the help of a reporter embedded with his unit. It was Rumsfeld's response, though, that instantly ignited a firestorm. "You go to war with the Army you have," Rumsfeld told Wilson, "not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." While the Bush Administration has been criticized for its refusal to acknowledge the scale of the dangers in Iraq, Rumsfeld's comments, however unintentionally, conveyed something far more disturbing, a seemingly blithe disregard for the welfare of troops. "You can talk like that to a congressional committee or a reporter," says retired four-star

Army General Barry McCaffrey, "but not to a soldier who's extremely concerned about the safety of himself and his buddies." Rumsfeld compounded the gaffe by adding that "you can have all the armor in the world in a tank, and a tank can be blown up." On Capitol Hill, Democrats ripped Rumsfeld for his insensitivity. "By that logic," says Delaware Senator Joseph Biden, "we should send our troops into battle on bicycles."

The exchange between Wilson and Rumsfeld was the most public airing of a concern that has spread among soldiers serving in Iraq and their families as the death toll has climbed: Is the U.S. sending troops into the line of fire without the means to protect themselves? The Pentagon has treated reports of equipment shortages--troops' hammering sheet metal onto humvees or asking their families to send bulletproof vests--as isolated kinks in the military supply chain. But last week, in response to Specialist Wilson, military officials were forced to acknowledge an unsettling reality: the U.S. has nowhere near the number of armored humvees in Iraq required to adequately protect troops from the insurgents' weapon of choice, the improvised explosive device, or roadside bomb. Of the 19,389 humvees in Iraq, 5,910 are fully armored, while an additional 9,134 are outfitted with less effective, bolted-on armor. But that leaves 4,345 humvees without any armor. These "naked" humvees are supposedly confined to U.S. bases, but they remain vulnerable to mortar attacks. It's no wonder that among those who have served in Iraq, there was widespread support for Wilson's grievance. "I'm glad it's getting attention," says a recently returned Marine who was injured by an improvised explosive, "because it will save lives. I'm sure of it."

The shortage of armored humvees is a parable for the miscalculations that have plagued the U.S. enterprise in Iraq. Given that it was a war of choice for the U.S., the typical soldier's reasoning goes, the Pentagon had plenty of time and money to make sure the troops had everything they needed. But John Keane, the Army's No. 2 officer during the war, told TIME last week that "we did not anticipate fighting an insurgency in Iraq, and that's the truth of it." As the rebellion escalated in late summer 2003, the Army didn't have the armor it needed to protect U.S. soldiers during messy nation building. "In terms of the equipment strategy," says Keane, who retired in October 2003, "that changed everything."

The chaos of postwar Iraq forced U.S. troops to wage alleyway fights with insurgents while trying to rebuild a war-torn nation--neither of which can be accomplished in 70-ton M1 tanks. Instead, commanders turned to the successor to the jeep, the 20-year-old High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV), as the humvee is officially known. With canvas doors and a skimpy skin of sheet metal, most humvees are designed to move small numbers of troops quickly. After a 1993 mine blast killed four U.S. soldiers in Somalia in their thin-skinned humvee, the Army began buying armored versions for deployment to hot spots like the Balkans. But neither the U.S. Army nor the Bush Administration fully embraced the vehicle until the Iraqi insurgency exploded. The Army originally thought it needed 235 armored humvees to help bring peace to Iraq. But shortly after Bush declared major combat over in May 2003, the need for armored humvees took off like a rocket. Five months later, commanders in Iraq wanted 3,100. By early this year, the requirement was 4,000. Last month the total quietly doubled to 8,105. The Army, in other words, needs 35 times as many of these vital vehicles as its war plan predicted.

As the insurgency intensified, soldiers in Iraq began replacing the humvees' canvas doors with metal plates, draping Kevlar fabric over the seats and lining the floors with sandbags. Slowly but surely, the Pentagon began outfitting soft-skinned humvees with 1,000-lb. Armor Survivability Kits--which protect passengers from ground-level attacks but don't harden the humvee's floor, a major vulnerability when dealing with roadside bombs. The Pentagon has also scoured the globe for heavily armored humvees, sending to Iraq hundreds that had been based in the Balkans, Germany and South Korea. Even a few earmarked to protect the Pentagon have been sent "downrange," as soldiers say. At $180,000 each, they cost more than twice as much as standard humvees.

The Bush Administration says it has ramped up the production cycle, spending $1.2 billion in the past year on improving armor for both vehicles and soldiers. The company beefing up the humvees, Armor Holdings Co., has boosted production at its Cincinnati, Ohio, plant from 30 a month when the Iraq war began to 450. "When I first started here, it took an entire year for us to build 59 humvees," says Michael Heaberlin, 52, a 10-year veteran of the line. "Now we do that many in 21/2 days." Stung by soldiers' complaints about the armor shortage, the Army late last week announced it would crank up production of armored humvees from the current 450 a month to 550. Pentagon officials expect all humvees in Iraq to be armored in some form by April.

Even that may not be enough if attacks persist at their current level. The demand for armored vehicles will keep rising. "Every time we get close to the duck as he's flying and we're catching up and we're trying to get a lead on him, the thing's upped," General Peter Schoomaker, the Army Chief of Staff, told Congress last month. Troops in the field say they don't have enough vehicles, period. If one goes down, they can't just drive over to a parking lot and pick up a new one. In insurgent hot spots like Ramadi, Marines say they sometimes don't go out in full force because there aren't enough vehicles that still work.

Even the heavily armored humvees, as Rumsfeld inelegantly reminded the troops last week, aren't fail-safe: 120 have been destroyed in combat in Iraq. Unlike M1 tanks, even beefed-up humvees can't always stop a rocket-propelled grenade or .50-cal. machine-gun bullet from killing those inside. But they are built to halt armor-piercing 7.62-mm rounds--the kind of bullets fired from AK-47s, an insurgent favorite. The roof is engineered to thwart the blast of a 155-mm artillery shell exploding overhead, and the floor is reinforced to protect passengers from a bomb or a 12-lb. mine buried in the road.

If nothing else, Specialist Wilson's grilling of Rumsfeld may finally force the military's civilian bosses to heed the concerns of soldiers like Captain Mark Chung, 37, an Army reservist who served in Iraq for nine months this year. Chung survived two roadside bomb attacks on his armored humvee; the second bomb exploded on the passenger side directly under his seat. "The up-armored humvee was the only thing that saved my life," he says. After returning from Iraq last month, Chung visited the Pentagon to implore officials to send more armored humvees to Iraq. He never got in to see Rumsfeld. "I knocked on his door," Chung says, "but the people in his office said I needed an appointment to see him." For the sake of the Americans risking their lives in Iraq, Rumsfeld would be wise to make some time for the soldiers now. --With reporting by Chris Maag/ Cincinnati, Nathan Thornburgh/ New York and Phil Zabriskie/ Baghdad

With reporting by Chris Maag/ Cincinnati; Nathan Thornburgh/ New York; Phil Zabriskie/ Baghdad