Armored Hummers

When an army soldier asked Rumsfeld why they had to scrounge in scrap heaps for extra vehicle armor Rumsfeld was temporarily knocked out of his onsetting dementia to answer 'Hell, I'm an old man and it's early in the morning. I'm just gathering my thoughts here.'

Rumsfeld paused long enough to answer: "As you know, you have to go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want." Why didn't he just cut to the chase and say "You're about to go to war! Quit your bitching!"?

Probably because he wanted to make another salient point: "If you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up. And you can have an up-armored Humvee and it can be blown up..."

So the entire point was "You're going to war, it doesn't matter how much armor you have, you're gonna die ANYway." Rumsfeld is apparently really candid in the morning.

He could have told them the real reason why they don't have enough armor: They didn't expect to have such a large number of troops in Iraq this late in the game. The fact that they don't have enough of the correct equipment (and that they are only now dealing with that oversight) is further proof that they haven't fully thought through their gameplan.