Once more, with feeling: Bush Lied, People Died!

Utah's lefty rag, the Salt Lake Tribune, has had a couple of their reporters in Iraq for the past few months attached to a local National Guard unit, the 222nd Field Artillery Battalion (the reporters even have their own blogs). Their posts have mostly been feel-good, reassuring human-interest stories but you knew, you just knew, they were itching to find something to pillory the military and the Bush Administration with.

Well, they finally found it. And what better subject than the supposed failure of the bumbling Rumsfeldian Neo-Cons to provide adequate armor for vehicles?

Now Captain Holly certainly isn't downplaying the importance of ensuring that all vehicles are adequately armored. I'm more than willing to provide the troops with whatever armor they may need, and I'm distressed to find that some vehicles are still not up to par. But I do take issue with this quote from a company commander (which, knowing the liberal media, might have been selectively edited to provide the desired effect):

Zecher only hopes the challenge is met before she has to explain to one of her soldier's parents why their child was killed in a poorly armored vehicle.

She said her frustrations are only tempered by an understanding that the U.S. military had not anticipated the challenge the insurgency would present to the Army's supply system.

"In every other war, the supply routes were not compromised as much as they are now," she said. "This is new to us."

With all due respect, this is hogwash. And having said that, Captain Holly will relate to his readers the sad tale of a US tank that wasn't quite good enough, the M-4 Sherman.

The Sherman was the main US battle tank at the start of the war and was used, with modifications, until V-E Day. Some 50,000 M-4s were made and used by the Allies.

The Sherman's design had several advantages: It was reliable, inexpensive, had good mobility and was easy to produce. Most importantly, it was relatively small enough to be shipped in large amounts across the Atlantic.

It also had several critical disadvantages; namely, it was inadequately armored and woefully undergunned. But worse than that, because it's engine was originally designed for aircraft, it used highly flammable gasoline instead of diesel fuel, in spite of recommendations from US tank commanders such as General George Patton.

In other words, it had the nasty habit of blowing up in a fireball whenever it got hit. The Germans were so impressed with it's propensity to burn that they nicknamed the Sherman "the Tommy Cooker".

The Sherman, in other words, was essentially obsolete by 1942.

Yet even though the Roosevelt Administration knew this by late 1942, based on the experience of the British in North Africa, they continued to allow great numbers of Shermans to be produced and shipped to US and Allied troops. It is not an exaggeration to say that thousands of American, British, French and Russian troops died as a direct result of the Sherman's inadequacies.

And talk about "hillbilly armor"; after the Normandy invasion, when it became obvious the Sherman couldn't stop the German 75 and 88 mm anti-tank shells, desperate GIs used metal plates, sandbags, tree trucks and wooden planks to protect themselves.

The truth is, the experience in Iraq with inadequately armored vehicles in neither unprecedented nor surprising. Every war is fought using weapons and equipment that were designed for the previous war, and no battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy.

So please, spare us the snide insinuations that somehow the Bush Administration was criminally negligent. In light of history, the experiences in Iraq are par for the course.