U.S. Troops’ Other Struggle

With metronomic regularity, President Bush declares that he has given and will give the U.S. military everything it needs to fight Iraqi insurgents. But the evidence is mounting that the administration, to borrow a famous Bush word, not only misunderestimated the number of troops required but is even now failing to properly equip the ones that are in Iraq.

A Times report today details continued nagging shortages of such critical items as helicopter parts and vehicle armor. And Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top commander in Iraq from mid-2003 until this summer, warned the Pentagon in a brutally frank Dec. 4, 2003, letter that a lack of spare parts was crippling his ability to fight the insurgents: “I cannot continue to support sustained combat operations with rates [of parts] this low,” he said in excerpts published Monday in the Washington Post. The general declines to comment, and the Pentagon says that, almost a year later, all is well.

No, it’s not, particularly among National Guard and Reserve units. As an apparent insubordination by 18 men and women from the 343rd Quartermaster Company based in South Carolina revealed, the administration is demanding that the former “weekend warriors” perform the duties of regular troops but isn’t providing the means to execute them. That, if the soldiers’ complaints are correct, includes armored and mechanically sound trucks as well as sufficient combat infantry escorts for supply convoys.

Although the military has improved in equipping soldiers with body armor, it still struggles to stay even with an insurgency that has become increasingly sophisticated and lethal.

In the presidential campaign, Bush regularly excoriates Sen. John F. Kerry for voting against an $87-billion supplemental war appropriation last year, a vote that Kerry has struggled to defend. But the measure passed, and the shoddiness and lack of backup that drove the Guard members to refuse their supply mission -- knowing that they risked their careers and freedom in doing so -- are not Kerry’s fault.

Even the military, whose very structure is threatened by any insubordination in a war zone, is implicitly acknowledging the accuracy of the complaints and is treating the Guard members with kid gloves.

The level of refusal is far from what it was at the height of the Vietnam War. As Col. Robert D. Heinl Jr. wrote in the Armed Forces Journal in 1971 in a widely reprinted article, “Our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and noncommissioned officers, drug-ridden and dispirited where not near mutinous.”

The South Carolina Guard members’ refusal to man a fuel convoy seems downright polite compared with that. But the complaints are representative of what other troops face, and reports from the field underscore their validity.