Army Spc. Thomas Wilson is a brave man

Few others -- in the press, in the cabinet, on Capitol Hill -- have had the guts to question Rumsfeld to his face. Wilson, a reservist from the Tennessee national guard about to be deployed from Kuwait into Iraq, asked the question that many soldiers in Iraq or waiting to go are asking: why are they being deployed without adequate supplies.

Rumsfeld was typically brusque and glib.

Mr. Rumsfeld, seemingly caught off guard by the sharp questioning, responded that the military was producing extra armor for Humvees and trucks as fast as possible, but that the soldiers would have to cope with equipment shortages. "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time," he said.

Specialist Thomas Wilson, a scout with a Tennessee National Guard unit set to roll into Iraq this week, was the first to step forward, saying that soldiers had had to scrounge through landfills here for pieces of rusty scrap metal and bulletproof glass - what they called "hillbilly armor" - to bolt to their trucks.

"Why don't we have those resources readily available to us?" Specialist Wilson asked Mr. Rumsfeld, drawing cheers and applause from many of the 2,300 soldiers assembled in a cavernous hangar here to meet the secretary.

A few minutes later, a soldier from the Idaho National Guard's 116th Armored Cavalry Brigade asked Mr. Rumsfeld what he and the Army were doing "to address shortages and antiquated equipment" that will affect National Guard soldiers heading to Iraq.

Mr. Rumsfeld seemed taken aback by the question and a murmur began spreading through the ranks before he silenced it. "Now, settle down, settle down," he said. "Hell, I'm an old man, it's early in the morning and I'm gathering my thoughts here."

Mr. Rumsfeld, 72, said all organizations had equipment, materials and spare parts of different vintages, but he expressed confidence that Army leaders were assigning the newest and best equipment to the troops headed for combat who needed it most. He said adding more armor to trucks and battle equipment did not make them impervious to enemy attack. "You can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up," he said. "And you can have an up-armored Humvee and it can be blown up."

Golly, Mr. Rumsfeld, it's fine to be churlish when confronted with the Pentagon press corps, but it's bad form to be so when speaking with the troops you're sending in to harm's way, made more so because of your mistakes.

And, as Fred Kaplan notes, you don't go to war with the army you have rather than the army you want when the war you're entering is one of your own choosing.

Of course, Rumsfeld could be indicating that he was forced to go to war with an inadequate fighting force because Bush and the neocons (most of whom work for Rumsfeld) declared war too hastily. But I doubt that's what he had in mind.

Rumsfeld's legion of mistakes is fast becoming the stuff of legend. They are frequent, huge, and most often fatal. The fact that he's been given a huge vote of confidence from Bush is testimony to what Stephen Colbert said the other night on The Daily Show. If you want to keep your job in the Bush cabinet, it isn't enough to merely make mistakes. You need to make colossal mistakes.