Three questions swirled around Maj. Gen. Brian Geehan's head this week as he toured supply distribution points in Iraq and truck driver camps in Kuwait.

"Are we getting the job done?" Geehan, the Army's chief of transportation and Fort Eustis commander asked just after visiting Navistar, the border crossing station into Iraq. "Do we have the right equipment to do the job and what lessons do we need to take back to the school house for future transporters?"

What Geehan found on his first trip to the desert since the invasion of Iraq last year is that yes, the job is getting done.

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But there are areas where there's just not enough equipment and people to go around.

For one, the Army is relying on civilian drivers to help deliver goods to the front lines.

There's simply not enough Army truck drivers in the service to haul the sheer magnitude of military equipment to troops nestled in Iraq and reconstruction supplies needed to rebuild the country, Geehan said.

"The theatre needs to put out 250 to 300 convoys a day just to provide the real essentials of war," Geehan said Sunday after a week of touring, inspecting and talking to soldiers.

Which is why drivers have been working under a high operational tempo and with contracted truck drivers, he said. The civilian drivers now make up a good portion of the convoys pushing north each day, Geehan said.

"However, Multinational Forces Iraq is looking at rail solutions to relieve the need on Army trucks," Geehan said.

When that happens, Geehan said, is still an unknown.

What many of the trucks' drivers also crave, Geehan has found, is better armor to protect themselves from threats of roadside bombs and small arms fire.

At Navistar on Sunday, soldiers from the 518th Gun Truck Company displayed their armored trucks, showcasing all the benefits and challenges, to the general.

In the beginning, all of the supply trucks that arrived in the Mideast came without any kind of armor or ballistic windows. When the threat of roadside bombs and small arms fire increased to drivers earlier this year, soldiers started bolting extra steel to their truck doors for a small level of added protection. Soldiers call it hillbilly armor. The Army calls it locally made, bolt-on armor.

Then the Army, in response to what was going on in the war zone, refined the added armor idea and started producing an Army-tested, Army-approved armoring kit.

The kit provides bullet-proof doors, windows and side panels and has been installed on most Humvees in the Mideast.

But for the main supply trucks, the transporters that are designed to haul tanks and the 915s created to pull flat-bed trailers, the armoring kits just recently arrived and commanders are struggling to get enough kits to protect all of their trucks.

The Eustis-based 7th Transportation Group just this week was notified they would get 120 armor kits for now. They control hundreds.

"We need to catch up," Geehan said. "We need to get that add-on-armor onto those vehicles as quickly as possible."

It's just now, Geehan said, that the production line has really begun to take on that need.

"The limiting factor has been an availability of the kits," Geehan said. "It's not a question of if you are in Iraq you are a higher priority. You make the decision based on who is getting the most contact." That contact, the way the enemy is attacking, Geehan said, is constantly changing.

From roadside bombs to small arms fire to throwing nails on the road, insurgents are doing whatever they can to stop supplies moving north.

Geehan made sure to talk to as many soldiers as possible to see how they react to the real thing because he also serves as the commandant for the transportation school at Eustis.