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12/15/2004: Gem o'the Day:
From Hardball's interview with Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf, Jr., AUS (Ret.) (go read the whole thing; well worth it):
MATTHEWS: Let‘s talk about equipment and weaponry and armor. Back when you fought and won the Persian Gulf War in 1991, did you ever have a deficiency in your preparation in terms of equipment, armor, or weaponry?
SCHWARZKOPF: Initially when I told people what I needed, they said, "Oh, no, you don‘t need that much," and there was a lot of second-guessing. Finally, Colin Powell, I prevailed on Colin and Colin set the record straight as far as Washington, D.C. was concerned, and from that point forward I had everything that I needed to make sure that we had a great victory.
MATTHEWS: What do you make of the service people‘s complaints last week to the, especially that one fellow from Tennessee, to the secretary of defense, saying that the military, the Marines and the Army, are denied the armor protection they need on those vehicles?
SCHWARZKOPF: The humvee was never considered an armored vehicle to begin with. So the system they‘ve come up with is a jerry-rigged system which really doesn‘t give you much protection when you‘re going against being blown from a bump, a mine on a side of a road, or something of that sort.
But they deserve every bit of protection that we can give them. Absolutely. And I was very, very disappointed--let me put it stronger, I was angry about the words of the secretary of defense when he laid it all on the Army. I mean, as if he as the secretary of defense didn‘t have anything to do with the Army, if the Army was over there doing it themselves screwing up.
Len on 12.15.04 @ 11:45 AM CST
