An Update About That Famous Armor Question

It turns out, according to NewsMax.com, that Edward Lee Pitts of the Chattanooga Times Free Press didn't have his facts straight when he coached a GI (actually a National Guardsman) and then finagled to have the question recognizer at Donald Rumsfeld's press conference recognize his prepared questioner first. I quote from NewsMax:

In fact, by the time Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter Edward Lee Pitts rehearsed Spc. Thomas "Jerry" Wilson on what to say to Rumsfeld, the Pentagon had already up-armored 97 percent of the vehicles in Thomas' 278th Regimental Combat Team, senior members of the Army's combat systems development and acquisition team said Thursday.

Further undermining the premise of Pitts' question, orders to up-armor the last 20 of the 278th's 830 vehicles were already in the pipeline when he engineered the bogus inquiry.

The Hat Tip of the Day goes to the Maryville (TN) Daily Times, which found out that only twenty vehicles assigned to that Guardsman's unit remained to be up-armored, and the job was done the very next day.

Once again: in WWII, soldiers didn't complain about things like this--they improvised. GI's have been doing it since the days of Gaius Marius, seven-times consul of the Roman Republic, who rediscovered the whole GI concept for Rome's armies more than twenty-one hundred years ago. Any soldier who complains about a thing like that today needs a reality check--and for that matter, maybe the whole country needs much better instruction in ancient and medieval history, and especially in military history, in order to put questions like that into their proper perspective.

The above makes that question bad enough, even before we find out that the questioner-behind-the-questioner was asking about a problem that was already solved.