More Rummy Indeed

While reading this, I stumbled across this at Belgravia Dispatch:

A "sucking chest wound". Rumsfeld's legacy. And, of course, also the legacy of those who supported the war, like BD, without fully accounting for the serial bungling that would occur at the strategic oversight level.

Greg was for quite a while, as he says, a supporter of the effort in Iraq. Time and the litany of "How the Bush Administration screwed up Iraq," stories have moved him into the critics column.

That is fair; everyone is entitled to their opinion of the Administration, the war and how it's been handled. There are plenty of valid complaints to be made. What rubs me the wrong way is commentary whose sub-text is a demand for perfection in terms of planning and execution for war, when war is the very embodiment of barely-controlled chaos.

While we all spent months lamenting the lack of body armor available to soldiers in Iraq, when we finally saw armor going to those who'd been without for so long...lo and behold, the response was something unexpected:

Extra body armor - the lack of which caused a political storm in the United States -has flooded in to Iraq, but many Marines here promptly stuck it in lockers or under bunks. Too heavy and cumbersome, many say.Marines already carry loads as heavy as 70 pounds when they patrol the dangerous streets in towns and villages in restive Anbar province. The new armor plates, while only about five pounds per set, are not worth carrying for the additional safety they are said to provide, some say.

"We have to climb over walls and go through windows," said Sgt. Justin Shank of Greencastle, Pa. "I understand the more armor, the safer you are. But it makes you slower. People don't understand that this is combat and people are going to die."

Staff Sgt. Thomas Bain of Buffalo, N.Y., shared concerns about the extra pounds."

Before you know it, they're going to get us injured because we're hauling too much weight and don't have enough mobility to maneuver in a fight from house to house," said Bain, who is assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment. "I think we're starting to go overboard on the armor."

Rumsfeld came to the Defense department with a commitment to transformation. The war plan(s) for Iraq reflected that commitment: Speed and agility.

What many bemoan is a simple fact of war: casualties happen, people die. It's sad, no one wants it but it's a simple fact. At what point would a plan that optimized soldiers' safety cease to be effective or otherwise begin to jeopardize those same soldiers' safety?

It's not as easy as just pointing a finger at Rumsfeld, wagging it and screaming "You didn't plan!" The fact is, there was plenty of planning. What there was also was a tradeoff.

Speed and agility. How many soldiers like the Marines quoted above have been saved by gambling on the ability to move quickly and with greater agility in a battle zone versus those killed from a mortal wound that might have been stopped with more armor? I don't know the answer to that, and I wonder if Greg or his commenters know either.

It just aint that simple.