The New York Times jumped on the story of ill-equipped troops being sent into a combat zone in 2004; so where are they in 2009?

This appeared  Thursday, May 7, in Newsmax.com:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld came here [Iraq] Wednesday to lead a morale-lifting town hall discussion with Iraq-bound troops. Instead, he found himself on the defensive, fielding pointed questions from soldiers complaining about aging vehicles that lacked armor for protection against roadside bombs.

Mr. Rumsfeld, seemingly caught off guard by the sharp questioning, responded that the military was producing extra armor for Humvees and trucks as fast as possible, but that the soldiers would have to cope with equipment shortages. ''You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time,'' he said.

Specialist Thomas Wilson, a scout with a Tennessee National Guard unit set to roll into Iraq this week, was the first to step forward, saying that soldiers had had to scrounge through landfills here for pieces of rusty scrap metal and bulletproof glass -- what they called ''hillbilly armor'' -- to bolt to their trucks.
 
''Why don't we have those resources readily available to us?'' Specialist Wilson asked Mr. Rumsfeld, drawing cheers and applause from many of the 2,300 soldiers assembled in a cavernous hangar here to meet the secretary.