On December 8, 2004, at Camp Buehring in Kuwait, Specialist Thomas Wilson asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld why soldiers “have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?” Soldiers of a Tennessee unit called the improvised plating “hillbilly armor.”
Rumsfeld answered: “You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want, or wish to have, at a later time.”
Here the soldiers were improvising, and the question was why they had to.