Fox: Bush and Rummy "tried to tamp down the firestorm" over armor debacle [View All]

Rumsfeld Grilling Revives War Plan Questions



http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,141094,00.html

WASHINGTON — Critics of the war in Iraq (search) seized on charges that U.S. troops there don't have enough armored vehicles as another example of poor planning by the Pentagon.

President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld (search) tried Thursday to tamp down the firestorm, which was ignited a day earlier when an Iraq-bound soldier publicly complained to Rumsfeld that the Army wasn't properly armoring vehicles for the campaign.

"This is about faulty analysis and a failed strategy," said Rep. Ellen Tauscher, a California Democrat who sits on the House Armed Services Committee. "We've never had enough troops on the ground since the fall of Saddam Hussein's government to deal with the insurgency because we didn't expect one."

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said Congress had given the Bush administration all of the defense spending it had requested. Why then, he asked in a letter to Rumsfeld, were soldiers combing landfills for scrap metal to protect themselves? "This administration has received every dollar they have asked for from Congress," Durbin said in his Chicago office Thursday. "So, the money has been there."