Petrelis Files

(Retired Maj. General Arnold Punaro)















S&S: Equipment Shortalls Hurting US Troops in Iraq

The Bush administration and its base of right-wing supporters continually harp on how the supposed liberal media is always looking for negative stories to report about the war in Iraq. These Bushies simply don't want any critical news coverage about the war or the Pentagon's efforts miserable record of supplying our troops with adequate equipment and supplies to do their jobs properly.

I wonder how the Bushies will respond to this story in today's edition of the Stars & Stripes, the qausi-independent military newspaper, which, in my opinion, is doing an excellent job of getting out stories from and about Iraq.

Will the Bushies accuse the retired general speaking his truth to power of undermining our troops? Maybe some right-wingers will label the Stars & Stripes a liberal publication out to demoralize the troops and our campaign of spreading democracy in the Middle East?

Or perhaps they'll just ignore what the general has to say and what the Stars & Stripes is reporting.

From the Stars & Stripes:

Guard and Reserve units returning from war zones are facing such serious shortfalls of basic equipment that the issue is becoming an “an Achilles heel” for the Pentagon, according to a retired general asked to assess the situation.

“You can have all the greatest people in the world and the greatest leaders, but if you don’t have the equipment, it doesn’t work,” Arnold Punaro, chairman of the Congressionally chartered Commission on the National Guard and Reserves, said Tuesday.

“That’s an Achilles heel the [Defense] Department is going to have work very closely with Congress and the units on,” said Punaro, a retired major general in the Marine Corps.

Punaro said he has been surprised too at the number of high-ranking officers, not only from the reserve components, but from the active Army and Marine Corps, who have gone public, “beating the drums in warning about basic stuff, like trucks and communications gear.”

Shortfalls are also occurring in unit inventories of trucks, Humvees, helicopters, engineering and bridging equipment, radios, and communications gear — “just basic nuts-and-bolts equipment” — Punaro said.

“One of our governors told us his Guard brigade just got back [from Iraq] and he will not have any equipment for four years,” Punaro said. [...]

They are supposed to deliver a final report to Congress in March 2007 that identifies significant problems areas and recommends changes in laws and policies to help fix them. [...]

“If you talk to people in the Pentagon, they’ll say ‘no sweat, [the reserves] can do it in a cakewalk, in their sleep’. And you look at the results of the units that have served in Afghanistan [for example] and come back and served at home, and they’ve certainly done exceedingly well.”

But some business owners are telling commissioners that they cannot continue to employ constantly deployed reservists, Punaro said.

Meanwhile, “a gazillion pay categories” and other bureaucratic snafus and outdated regulations make bringing people on and off active duty “an absolute nightmare,” he said.

“My personal instinct is that [the situation with the reserves] is not as rosy as people suggest,” Punaro said.

So far, it seems as though Punaro's assessments have not been reported by any mainstream news outlets. Why are American reporters and editors, except for the Stars & Stripes, failing to write about what Punaro is saying about our ill-equiped troops?