Donald Rumsfeld talked to troops in Kuwait yesterday, and asked them to fire tough questions at him.  One exchange:

Q:  Yes, Mr. Secretary.  Our soldiers have been fighting in Iraq for coming up on three years.  A lot of us are getting ready to move north relatively soon.  Our vehicles are not armored.  We’re digging pieces of rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass that’s already been shot up, dropped, busted, picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles to take into combat.  We do not have proper armament vehicles to carry with us north.

SEC. RUMSFELD:  I talked to the General coming out here about the pace at which the vehicles are being armored.  They have been brought from all over the world, wherever they’re not needed, to a place here where they are needed.  . .

As you know, you go to war with the Army you have.  They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.  Since the Iraq conflict began, the Army has been pressing ahead to produce the armor necessary at a rate that they believe – it’s a greatly expanded rate from what existed previously, but a rate that they believe is the rate that is all that can be accomplished at this moment. . .

It’s interesting, I’ve talked a great deal about this with a team of people who’ve been working on it hard at the Pentagon.  And 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.  And you can go down and, the vehicle, the goal we have is to have as many of those vehicles as is humanly possible with the appropriate level of armor available for the troops.  And that is what the Army has been working on.

Words of reassurance, I'm sure.

Wonder if Rumsfeld's humvee was armored?

And why, with only six members of Bush's original 15-member cabinet staying for his second term, does Bush keep Rumsfeld on?

I honestly have no idea.  Here's Bull Moose's take:

Despite the mass exodus, the incompetent one remains -Rummy. All that happened on his watch was an abysmal post-war plan and a prison scandal. This confirms that the only ones held accountable in this Administration are welfare mothers and struggling third grade students. For them, standards and accountability apply. For Rumsfeld, he is just passed along to the next grade (or term) regardless of his performance.

And Josh Marshall's:

One criticism of the president that loomed large in the last election -- and not just among Democrats but with many Republicans too -- was that this president either does not recognize or will not admit mistakes. And whichever it was, there was no accountability for them. In most cases those 'mistakes' people were talking about were ones under Rumsfeld's purview. And he would seem to be the only one -- certainly the only one of the principals -- that the president insists on keeping in place.

In this administration, the buck may not stop at the Oval Office, but the hard line against accountability sure does start there.

ADDENDUM:  Fred Kaplan makes much the same point, in Slate:

Rumsfeld's answer was, first, unforgivably glib, reminiscent of his shrugged line about the looting in the days after Saddam's fall ("Stuff happens"), but more shocking because here he was addressing American soldiers who are still fighting and dying, 20 months after Baghdad's fall, as a result of Rumsfeld's decisions.

More than that, his answer was wrong. If you're attacked by surprise, you go to war with the army you have. But if you've planned the war a year in advance and you initiate the attack, you have the opportunity—and obligation—to equip your soldiers with what they'll need. Yes, some soldiers will get killed no matter the precautions, but the idea is to heighten their odds—or at least not diminish them—as they're thrust into battle.

So here stands the secretary of defense, long and widely despised by officers for rejecting their advice before the war and now openly criticized by the grunts for failing to give them proper cover as the war rages on all around them. . .

Rumsfeld has not merely made mistakes, he has made fatal mistakes. Defense secretaries don't decide whether to go to war, but they do decide how to fight the war once it begins. Even most supporters of the war in Iraq acknowledge that Rumsfeld has fought it in a disastrous manner. The litany of errors has been recited many times—distorting prewar intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, whittling down troop levels that the Army chiefs recommended for postwar stability, torpedoing State Department plans for occupation, alienating traditional allies whose assistance is now desperately needed, covering up crimes at Abu Ghraib.

What lessons are the new Cabinet officers to derive from Rumsfeld's retention? It's one thing for a president to demand a Cabinet that follows consistent policies. (Among Jimmy Carter's failures was his hesitation to take out the long knives and choose between his dovish secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, and his hawkish national security, Zgibniew Brzezinski.) It's another thing to demand a Cabinet so loyal and pliant that its members never dare raise arguments, doubts, or questions about the president's leanings.

Rumsfeld's survival—which, given Colin Powell's dismissal, amounts to triumph—tells the newcomers that to get along they must go along; that they're working not in a government but in an echo chamber.