http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59924-2004Dec12?language=printerIn muddy gravel lots, along weedy railroad tracks and in grassy fields, the flotsam of war is washing up at a sprawling Army-run repair post: five- and 10-ton trucks, road graders, river boats, forklifts, coils of tank track, piles of road wheels and Humvees by the score, doors pocked with shrapnel scars, windows riddled with bullet holes or frosted white by explosive heat, their fenders gashed by rocket-propelled grenades, their crews' names still etched on the windshields.
When Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was confronted by a soldier in Kuwait recently about why troops in Iraq had to scrounge for parts, he might have pointed to the Red River Army Depot on the outskirts of Texarkana for the answer. Here, in unadorned open-air factories, bustling hives of workers struggle through budget limits and a burgeoning repair load to keep the troops equipped.
Twenty-one months after U.S. forces entered Iraq, the Defense Department is only now coming to terms with the equipment shortages caused by the prolonged fighting there. The Pentagon has prepared an unprecedented emergency spending plan totaling nearly $100 billion -- as much as $30 billion more than expected as recently as October -- say senior defense officials and congressional budget aides. About $14 billion of that would go to repairing, replacing and upgrading an increasingly frayed arsenal.
"There's no lack of work and only more on the horizon," sighed Dennis L. Lewis, chief of the business office at the 29-square-mile depot. "There's no end in sight."
To critics of the Pentagon leadership, the ongoing scramble at the Army's five repair depots speaks volumes about poor war planning, and about Rumsfeld's stubborn determination to transform the military rather than focus on the more prosaic task of rebuilding what the defense chief last week called "the Army you have . . . not the Army you might want."
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