Armor is More Than Just 'Nice'

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit is a sharp, insightful commentator on what's going on in the world. By many accounts, his is the most popular blog online. I read his stuff virtually every day and have mountains of respect for his many abilities and his learning.

But I was a bit miffed by his take on the question posed by the National Guardsman to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld regarding the lack of armoring for US military vehicles in Iraq:

ARMOR: Various snarky antiwar readers seem to think that this story, in which Rumsfeld was challenged (by a member of my local National Guard outfit, actually) regarding armor, is somehow a devastating indictment of the Bush Administration and the war in toto. Actually, I'd say it's rather a lot less than that.

Armor's nice, of course, when people are shooting at you...

Readers of this blog know that generally speaking, I think that preachers like me should refrain from making public political commentary, unless they see what they consider to be an injustice being perpetrated. Leaving American military personnel without adequate armor for their vehicles is, I feel, a grave injustice. And so, I publish the brief email exchange that happened between Glenn and me after I read his comment that "armor is nice."

Glenn:
"Armor's nice"? Nice?

The lack of armor says nothing pro or con about whether we should have gone into Iraq. So, people who are using the flap over Rumsfeld's response to a National Guardsman's question [to argue for or against the war] are barking up the wrong tree.

But "nice" is not the descriptor I would use for armor for an occupying army in a nation that had a history of sponsoring people who attach explosives to themselves.

"Nice" is not the appropriate adjective for armor in a country that, everybody in the world had to know would require long years of post-war occupation.

Try words like essential, necessary, required, and even the more tepid, needed.

Call not having it negligent, irresponsible, and, again more tepidly, ungrateful to our fighting men and women.

We ask these people to fight in Iraq. We start the war. So, we should have had some notion of the post-war occupation needs, especially since the whole world knew that we would win in a matter of weeks. It borders on the criminal not to give our military the tools with which to finish the war, which means a successful occupation.

I'm a Republican, Glenn, and I am livid about this situation and the secretary's response. Our military personnel are being treated unjustly by the very nation that should be expressing gratitude and support.

Chocolate ice cream is nice. Spring days at the ballgame are nice. Armor is a lot more than nice and I don't think that your comment was very nice.

I hope that you'll re-think your response to this situation.

Mark Daniels

Glenn wrote back:

Armor is a trade-off, like everything else. What this really remindsme of is bombers in WWII. It was quite clear that the extra speed you got by stripping guns away did more to protect bombers than the gunsdid. But the crews wanted the guns for psychological reasons. I think that some of the armor issue is the same way.

Here's how I responded:

I understand the analogy you're drawing, but I feel that it's invalid. Nobody from the Pentagon has advanced the notion that the reason for failing to adequately uparmor the vehicles used by our personnel, particularly our National Guard and Reserve personnel, has anything to do with "trade-offs." In fact, as I understand it, the Pentagon plans on uparmoring current vehicles as well as producing new ones that are more adequately armored.

But thanks for your response.

What do you think?