WP: Senate Panel to Set Hearings on Iraq Insurgency, Shortages

[leftchick]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64782-2004Dec14.html

<snip>

The Senate Armed Services Committee will hold hearings on the Iraq war when the new Congress convenes next month, including an examination of criticism that the Defense Department failed to prepare for the insurgency and went into action with a shortage of armor for trucks and Humvees, the panel's ranking Democrat, Sen. Carl M. Levin (Mich.), said yesterday.

Levin, speaking from Belgium in a conference call with reporters, was returning with Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), the committee's chairman, from a round of talks in Baghdad with U.S. military leaders, and criticized the administration's "poor planning and rosy scenarios" it relied on before the invasion.


"The problem was created in the assumption that was adopted going in . . . that there would be a peaceful aftermath and that we wouldn't be using Humvees and trucks in urban guerrilla warfare," Levin said. "That was a false assumption" and "has led to a lot of problems, including the inadequate troops and equipment not being sufficient to deal with the violent aftermath." He said that the "major issue now is the trucks where only something like 20 percent . . . have adequate armor."

Criticism that the Pentagon has too few armored vehicles in Iraq intensified last week, when a soldier asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld at a televised meeting in Kuwait why troops were having to scavenge for armor plating in junkyards. Rumsfeld replied: "As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time."

[UL_Approved]

1. I hope they get nailed

About time this problem got acknowledged.

[dbt]

2. A Congress that voted overwhelmingly to give bu$h his war will now

INVESTIGATE the conduct of that war? A Congress that handed its power over to an unelected poseur (who either let or MADE 9/11 happen) will now seek to know what went wrong?

There is so much irony in my diet that magnets are sticking to my ass!

:crazy:
dbt

[leftchick]

3. just heard this report on NPR....

these dems are pathetic!