Punishing Good Deeds

As I noted in this post, any complaints that we don't have enough of a specific piece of equipment stems from our continual attempts to improve our equipment or replace it with better stuff. Our troops are superbly trained and well equipped by any real-world standard you can think of.

So members of the Loyal Opposition who are hyper-ventilating about armor shortages are horrifyingly ignorant at best or cynically lying at worst.

Note this detail of one Army commenter to this post:

The short version of the story is that they call this upgrade to the Armor, FRAG5 because it is the fifth such armor upgrade to this one vehicle in just the four years of the war. This number of upgrades does not include the turret upgrades and unit driven upgrades. The number of upgrades per truck sits now at a minimum of eight, with only five being manufactured for the body of the truck. A little quick math and that works out to two per year for just one vehicle type, which we happen to have over 70,000 of.

Got it? We continually improve. And the speed and scope of our improvements is astounding. But as we replace older models with newer ones, there is going to be a period of time before every troop has the new model. And that is a gap wide enough to allow the Loyal Opposition to assert that we are failing to support our troops. As if the Loyal Opposition wants to win!

The willingness of the Loyal Opposition to simply lie about the actual situation is simply stunning to me. Wait. No, that's not right.

The willingness of our press to allow our Loyal Opposition to get away with such gross distortions is stunning. No, I can see that. Again, not quite right.

Ah Hell. We go to war with the press and opposition we have and not the press and opposition we would like to have.

But I can note that if our opposition put as much effort into winning in Iraq as it does in winning Pennsylvania Avenue, we'd probably be arguing about another peace dividend by now.