GOP lawmaker Collins joins Rumsfeld critics
Senator's letter cites armored vehicle situation in Iraq
From Joe Johns and Steve Turnham
CNN Washington Bureau
 |  U.S. Sen. Susan Collins was the chief Republican Senate negotiator on the recently passed intelligence bill. |
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 CNN's Judy Woodruff on Donald Rumsfeld's critics.
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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has joined other Republicans in criticizing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Collins, R-Maine, fired off a tough letter Wednesday to Rumsfeld, describing his remarks about the lack of "up-armored" Humvees in war zones as "troubling."
"I am very concerned that it appears the Pentagon failed to do everything in its power to increase production" of the vehicles, Collins wrote.
"The Department of Defense still has been unable to ensure that our troops have the equipment they need to perform their mission as safely as possible."
Collins also complained that the Army requested production of an additional 100 Humvees a month only after a soldier complained about the lack of necessary armor on trucks during a December 9 town hall meeting with Rumsfeld in Kuwait.
"Thus far, the Pentagon has received only 5,910 of the 8,105 of factory-armored Humvees commanders say they need," Collins wrote. "Why was this request not placed earlier to increase fully armored Humvee production from 450 to 550 a month at a time when many of us brought to the Pentagon's attention the shortages relayed to us by our constituent-troops and their families?"
Rumsfeld responded to a question about soldiers using scrap metal to improve protection on trucks, saying "you go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have."
U.S. Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Nebraska, said troops in Iraq "deserved a far better answer than that flippant response."
"That might work in a newsroom where you can be cute with a television audience," he told CNN this week, "but not in a room where you're putting men and women in harm's way. I wonder what the parents thought."
Rumsfeld told the troops that shortages of armor did not stem from a lack of money but were "a matter of physics." The manufacturers of add-on armor are producing it as fast as humanly possible, he said.
Two companies producing armor plating disputed that assertion and said they could produce as many as double the number of armor kits in a month.
In May, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, fielded a similar question about armor on military vehicles from a soldier in Baghdad -- an event that Rumsfeld also attended.
"It's not a matter of resources; it's a matter of how fast can we build these things and get them over here," Myers said, according to a Defense Department transcript.
On Wednesday, Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson told reporters that the Army will spend $4 billion on buying uparmored trucks and add-on kits in the next six to eight months.
Reports: McCain, Lott also critical
Another influential Republican on the Armed Services Committee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, has been sharply critical of Rumsfeld.
McCain said he has "no confidence" in the defense secretary and told The Associated Press, "There are very strong differences of opinion between myself and Secretary Rumsfeld" on the issue of troop strength in Iraq. (Full story)
The Pentagon said this month that it was dispatching an additional 1,500 troops to Iraq and extending the stays of more than 10,000 others to bolster security ahead of the January elections. The moves will bring the number of American forces in Iraq from nearly 140,000 to an all-time high of about 150,000, the Pentagon said.
Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Mississippi, joined the Republicans who -- while not asking for Rumsfeld's resignation -- want a change.
"I'm not a fan of Secretary Rumsfeld," Lott told the Biloxi Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday, according to the AP. "I don't think he listens enough to his uniformed officers."
The AP quoted him as saying, "I would like to see a change in that slot in the next year or so. I'm not calling for his resignation, but I think we do need a change at some point."
Calls for Rumsfeld's resignation have come from some outspoken Democrats -- notably Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware and Sen. Jon Corzine of New Jersey.
"No one has been held accountable" for any of things that have gone wrong in the Iraq war -- "the miscalculation and interpretation of the intelligence before the war," a "failure to secure all the weapons dumps" and "a problem with our administration of the prisons," Corzine said this week.
Biden said that "it was time for him to step down a year and a half ago" and said that if indeed the nation went to war "with the Army we had and it was ill-equipped, then we should have waited." ("Late Edition" transcript)
Biden added that Rumsfeld left "an incredibly mechanized Army" at home.
"We did not go with the Army we had," he said.
However, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, has defended Rumsfeld, saying the secretary's leadership "has been firm when we needed to be firm."
"We misunderstood the nature of what we thought would happen after Baghdad," Graham said Sunday.
A spokesman for the Senate Armed Service Committee, John Ullyot, released a statement this week indicating that the armor issue will play a major part of an oversight hearing on the Iraq mission early in the new Congress, which meets January 4.
"Since the first day the Defense Department identified a shortage of vehicle armor, Congress not only has provided the full armor funding requested by the department, it has gone beyond that, by providing $1.3 billion more for additional armor and armored vehicles in 2003-2004," the statement said.
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Associated Press contributed to this report.
