In their feeble attempts to bolster Donald Rumsfeld, Glenn Reynolds (no, I won’t link to him) and his ilk are trying to make the case that soldiers have always had to “uparmor” with whatever they could scrounge, and that anyway, a heavily armored vehicle just makes you slower (apparently they think that, like in the movies, you can outrun explosions from things like IEDs).
Rummy says:
As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. Theyre not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.
In his radio speech of May 26, 1940 — when France fell, a year-and-a-half before Pearl Harbor — here’s what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said:
Within the past year the productive capacity of the aviation industry to produce military planes has been tremendously increased. In the past year the capacity more than doubled, but that capacity is still inadequate. But the Government, working with industry is determined to increase that capacity to meet our needs. We intend to harness the efficient machinery of these manufacturers to the Government’s program of being able to get 50,000 planes a year.
That represented a more than ten-fold increase from previous levels. And it was in aviation, one of the most expensive and technologically-advanced industries.