No it certainly doesn't excuse the whiners. We know that field upgrades and homegrown ingenuity to fix probmels that can't wait for shipping and supply trains is as old as war, but we have to keep hammering it into the morons who want to turn a normal logistical problem, which the DoD was fixing even before the loaded question, into a disaster movie of epic proportions. That's what they're working on here.
By Friday, this will have been turned into a nice rhetoric-byte or three, to be used in antiwar protests. Our troll friends are here specifically to come up with material.
We agree that the 'armor crisis' is bogus. OTOH, the soldiers themselves involved may have not been out of line in that their three principle traditional duties have always been to kill people, break things, and belly ache about the CO.
Yep, and once we find them we will sort them out.
Ops4 God Bless America!