Adaptability as a court-martial offense?

"(Y]ou go to war with the Army you have ... not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." So spoke Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during a December 8 "town meeting" with Iraq-bound troops in Kuwait. Rumsfeld's delphic pronouncement was offered in response to a pointed question posed by Specialist Thomas Wilson, a scout with the Tennessee National Guard: "We've had troops in Iraq for coming up on three years and we've always staged here out of Kuwait. Now why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles and why don't we have those resources readily available to us?"

Some Bush-aligned "conservative" media sought to misdirect public attention from the outrageous situation described by Wilson by focusing on the fact that his question had been "planted" by an embedded newspaper reporter. But the reporter certainly didn't "plant" the enthusiastic response of the assembled soldiers to Wilson's question, which potently described a significant source of frustration for our overstretched, under-equipped troops.

Shocking as it may seem, the Pentagon has actually punished troops for trying to "up-armor" their vehicles without authorization.

"At a time when some U.S. troops are complaining they have to scrounge for equipment, six Ohio-based reservists were court-martialed for taking Army vehicles abandoned in Kuwait by other units so they could carry out their own unit's mission to Iraq," reported the AP on December 12. "Members of the 656th Transportation Company based in Springfield ... said they needed the equipment to deliver fuel that was needed by U.S. forces in Iraq for everything from helicopters to tanks. The reservists took two tractor-trailers and stripped parts from a five-ton truck that had been abandoned in Kuwait by other units that had already moved into Iraq."

Former chief warrant officer Darrell Birt and five other reservists were charged with theft, destruction of Army property, and conspiracy to cover up those offenses. Birt and two others pleaded guilty; the rest were convicted. All of them received six-month sentences. Birt finished his term in November.

"Nobody ever reported these trucks stolen," Birt told the AP. "The deal was, when you are moving, if it was going to take more than 30 minutes to fix it, you left it. I'm a Christian man and I can't ignore what we did, but it was justified to get us in the fight and sustain the fight."

That is to say, Birt and his colleagues fought the war with the equipment they had, not the equipment they should have had--and were sent to jail as a reward for their adaptability.