Obama’s Military Gets Lean
“I, personally, think that a lot of money could be cut out of the Defense Department’s budget. There is strong evidence that the DOD bureaucracy is mostly an obstacle to action, and several Secretaries of Defense have tried to reform it or, failing that, to work around it. So I think that money could be saved, if an administration were willing to take on 1) the entrenched bureaucracy of the department, and 2) influential Congressmen and Senators who are determined to preserve bases and weapons programs that benefit their districts and states.
Unfortunately, that isn’t what the Obama administration has in mind. Obama intends to cut the defense budget the easy way–no reform, no hard decisions, just saving money by impairing our ability to defend ourselves.”
Comment: John Hinderaker could have added with some appropriate comment, the military budget is about the only budget we Americans will see any slash and burn activity in his devotion to reduce the horrendous American debt, so much of it he has caused and will continue to cause.
He will now parade before the American people and in teleprompter tones and movements brag about his frugality and devotion to balance some budget.
California gal, Lisa Rich sent me the following comments from Allen West and others regarding Obamaslashing of the military:
“Rep. Allen West says the military cuts outlined by President Barack Obama at the Pentagon Thursday show “incompetence” in understanding the nation’s national security needs and the defense strategy is not “coherent.”
“We’re not talking about a coherent national security strategy — what the president laid out is very dangerous and it really does show incompetence in understanding national security strategy,” West said. “He did not talk about how we go forward on the 21st century battlefield — the ability to engage, deter, and strike the enemy when necessary. We cannot sit around and say we won’t fight a second combat operation because the enemy has a vote in this.
………..after World War II we gutted the military to such a degraded state that the first Army battalion that showed up on the battlefield in Korea was absolutely decimated — I don’t want to see that type of things happen to my friends and also one of my relatives that’s still serving in the military.”
But it’s not like we have to worry about North Korea anymore. In other good news the strategy makes it all but impossible for us to counter it in a new conflict.
To understand what’s really at stake here read Major General Scales’ piece in the Washington Post.
Unfortunately, Obama’s plan does exactly that. It forgets the lessons of history. Some facts: Harry Truman seeking to never repeat the costs of World War II reduced the Army from 8 million soldiers to fewer than half a million. Without the intervention of Congress, he would have eliminated the Marine Corps entirely. The result was the evisceration of both land services in Korea, a war Truman never intended to fight.
With Dwight Eisenhower came the “New Look” strategy that sought to reduce the Army and Marine Corps again to allow the creation of a nuclear delivery force built around the Strategic Air Command. Along came Vietnam, a war that Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson never wanted to fight. But by 1970 our professional Army broke apart and was replaced by a body of amateurs. The result was defeat and 58,000 dead.
After Vietnam, the Nixon administration broke the Army again. I know. I was there to see the drug addiction, murders in the barracks and chronic indiscipline, caused mainly by a dispirited noncommissioned corps that voted with its feet and left. Then came Jimmy Carter’s unique form of neglect that led to the “hollow Army” of the late ’70s, an Army that failed so miserably in its attempt to rescue the American hostages in Iran.
Filed under: Barack Obama, Economics and Finance, Marxism, National Politics
