The warrior as welder.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: Tilting at Windmills

Another illustration of how maddening the Pentagon can be comes from The Wall Street Journal's Greg Jaffe. It reminds me of the failure to provide body armor that we discussed last month. In this case it is the failure to adequately armor the Humvee. Many of the deaths and maiming injuries suffered by our soldiers could have been avoided if this simple step had been taken. At the beginning of the Iraq War, only 2 percent of the Army's 110,000 Humvees were armored. Even last May, after two months of fighting, the Army still said it needed only 250 armored Humvees in Iraq. Meanwhile, soldiers in the field were desperately trying to weld sheets of metal on the vehicles to give themselves some protection. Now the Army has finally ordered 11,000 armored...