We Need More Defense Spending, Not Further Cuts

Of the four wars that happened in my lifetime, none occurred because America was too strong.

- - Ronald Reagan

Our military is being asked yet again to do more with less. I guess if we can repeal DADT in the middle of war, there's no reason we can just cut the military budget, already nearly 20% below historic average relative to GDP, by another $78 billion.

In other news, China recently unveiled its latest attempt at stealth fighter technology, they recently fielded a "game changing" missile capable of killing an aircraft carrier at in excess of 900 miles, Iran continues its drive towards nuclear weapons, North Korea could well bring us into a war in South Korea, nuclear armed Pakistan is a failed state that could easily fall to Muslim fundamentalists . . . . did I miss anything? Hmmmm, let's see, Russia doing war games aimed at a nuclear attack on Poland, Hugo the Clown getting medium range missiles from Iran that can reach the U.S., . . .

The world is not a safe place. Not all of the laws on paper and nor all of the treaties written in ink will change that reality, nor stop a single bullet. Notwithstanding the beliefs of many on the left, America is not the cause of strife in the world, it is the stabilizing influence. We weaken our military even further at our own peril. We may find that we have saved a penny today, only to have to spend a pound in the long run. While there may be savings to be had in reforming the Pentagon procurement system, I think it ill advised indeed to be cutting weapons systems or manpower.

Read More...

Summary only...

A Dose Of Deficit (& Spending) Reality

This from an exceptional post by Randall Hoven at the American Thinker:

Just for grins, use the above chart to dissect Christopher Hayes' statement that our current and future deficits are caused by "three things: the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush tax cuts and the recession."

Two of those three things -- the wars and tax cuts -- were in effect from 2003 through 2007. Do you see alarming deficits or trends from 2003 through 2007 in the above chart? No. In fact, the trend through 2007 is shrinking deficits. What you see is a significant upward tick in 2008, and then an explosion in 2009. Now, what might have happened between 2007 and 2008, and then 2009?

Democrats taking over both houses of Congress, and then the presidency, was what happened. Republicans wrote the budgets for the fiscal years through 2007. Congressional Democrats wrote the budgets for FY 2008 and on. When the Democrats also took over the White House, they immediately passed an $814-billion "stimulus." (The $814 billion figure is from the same CBO report as the Iraq War costs. See sources at end of article.)

The sum of all the deficits from 2003 through 2010 is $4.73 trillion. Subtract the entire Iraq War cost and you still have a sum of $4.02 trillion.

No one will say that $709 billion is not a lot of money. But first, that was spread over eight years. Secondly, let's put that in some perspective. Below are some figures for those eight years, 2003 through 2010.


•Total federal outlays: $22,296 billion.
•Cumulative deficit: $4,731 billion.
•Medicare spending: $2,932 billion.
•Iraq War spending: $709 billion.
•The Obama stimulus: $572 billion.

Read the whole story.

Read More...

Summary only...

Defenseless - The Obama Budget

Obama sent a record budget to Congress, proposing billions in funding for every left wing cause imaginable, then claimed yesterday that he is fiscally responsible for asking for cuts amounting to 1/2 of 1% of his total budget. It is shameless to the point of parody. But scratch the surface of the budget and the savings and you quickly go from parody to ominous.

The bulk of Obama's proposed savings are coming from our Defense budget, the one place where significant increases in funding are necessary. And to make matters worse, among those handful of billions Obama intends to save, a goodly part of it comes from deep cuts in our missile defense program. This in a world that is getting more, not less, dangerous, and with our military desperately in need of expansion and refit. Obama is ignoring the exponential growth of the nuclear threat and he is reordering our defense spending priorities in the same manner that France did prior to 1939.

You can read at Hot Air the story of the Obama budget and Obama's mind-numbingly ridiculous assertion of fiscal responsibility for his proposing of $17 billion in budget cuts. And Bizzyblog points out that even the $17 billion in cuts is all smoke and mirrors. I will not add to that. My concern is with the defense side of the coin - and a small coin it has become.

Our military is in dire straights in terms of size and equipment. The following is from an article by MG Robert Scales discussing our military readiness posture in April, 2007. It was, at the time, critical, and there is nothing that I have seen since to suggest a significant change to that posture.

We have learned from painful experience in Iraq and Afghanistan that tomorrow's ground forces must be re-equipped with many more fighting vehicles that are light, mobile, easily transported and capable of keeping more soldiers protected for longer periods. Properly equipping the Army to win the long war will be very expensive. But we have fought 12 wars in the last 30 years and all but one has been decided on the ground. We will fight another one sooner than any of us would like. If we are to break the cycle of underfunding followed by rapid re-funding that has caused so much human tragedy, we must start now and must build a new Army for tomorrow rather than put yesterday's Army back on the shelf.

- MG Robert Scales, discussing the degraded state of Army readiness as of April, 2007. Indeed, as he points out, but for the Reagan era, our military had suffered significant underfunding for decades - under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

You will recall that a central argument of Obama and the left for bringing the Iraq War to an immediate surrender was because our military was undersized and the Iraq war was taking a tremendous toll on our equipment. The fact of a degraded military was certainly true, though the answer to that was not to surrender in Iraq, it was to make a big increase in defense spending. Bush and the Republican administration through 2006 attempted to fight two wars without increasing the defense budget to realistically account for equipment degradation and shortfalls. This remained true when the left took over Congress in 2006.

Now that the left has the reins of power, the one thing that Obama is not doing is making any increases in defense spending. Indeed, instead of rearming the military so it is prepared for the most difficult of confrontations - a conventional war - Obama is making huge cuts in expensive weapons systems that we will need for such confrontations in the future. He is instead, through Sec. of Def. Gates, reordering priorities in order to fight the much less costly "last war." You can read the itemization of cuts here. Secretary of Defense Gates seems fully complicit in this - and if his performance at Senate Hearings the other day are any indication, then he is both acting as the front man for specific Obama policy he is willing to be less then honest in furtherance of that policy. I am very surprised by that.

But that is an aside. The long and short of it all is that, instead of keeping us on a track so that we maintain superiority on the conventional battlefield, Obama is ordering our military to focus on unconventional warfare - i.e., the "last war." While it gives Obama the luxury of not having to sink billions into defense, the "last war" theory of military preparedness has ever been a trap for nations. For example, one need only to look to France in the late 1930's. They prepared for the next war expecting a replay of the last one - and thus, they based their defense around fixed fortifications of the Maginot Line. The line was breached by a new form of warfare - blitzkrieg - using superior weapons. France fell in days.

And it is not as if we face a paucity of conventional war threats. China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran are the four most obvious of those threats at the moment, but who knows where the next threat will come from. Indeed, Iraq was a conventional threat in 2002. But our conventional warfare capabilities then were so superior that they quickly folded - as indeed, they had near a decade earlier. Moreover, we now know that the Soviet Union considered attacking the West in the 1980's. Kim Il Sung put North Korea on a war footing about a year or so prior to that. Both pulled back. Why they did so is simple to assess - they had a very realistic respect for our capabilities to fight a conventional war. To paraphrase - it was "peace through superior firepower." But take away the perception of that superiority and, as surely as night follows day, the enemies of the West will not feel so constrained.

If we remain fully prepared for a conventional war, we can still also be prepared for unconventional conflicts. The reverse is not true. And thus, if we give away our conventional warfare superiority, we do so at great cost. Nor will it be something that can be at all easily resurrected. Combat systems today take years to develop and then years to ramp up production. The decisions made today will be with us for decades to come.

Compounding this situation by orders of magnitude is Obama's unfathomable decision to cut spending for missile defense. One of the cuts about which Obama so spuriously crowed yesterday was almost a 15% cut - 1.2 billion dollars - in the budget for the Missile Defense Agency. Can there be any possible justification for this? This is a system that grows more critical by the day. Pakistan is on the edge of takeover by the Taliban. North Korea wants to sell its technology to the highest bidders. Iran is continuing with their nuclear program and it has kick started proliferation throughout the Middle East. With that in mind, nothing could be more important to the defense of our nation and the free (for the moment) world than a robust missile defense.

Obama's cuts in defense are not rationale. ACORN is set to receive vast amounts of funding, while our military capabilities are to degraded. It leads one to wonder whether Obama is simply cynical and opportunistic, or is he really as naive and unrealistic as his budget priorities make him appear? Or is it a toxic mix of all four?

Read More...

Summary only...

The Utility of Missle Defense & The Futility If Obama Is Elected

Richard Fernandez at The Belmont Club has a good post on the utility of the Missle Defense being pushed by the U.S. and why Russia, among others, is so dead set against it. In essence, it is because it severely degrades Russian capabilities to conduct limited warfare against the West without triggering a massive response from the U.S. The same is true of Iran.

As an aside, we will have nothing to worry about in this regards if Obama is elected. That of course is if he meant it when he promised to strip defense spending, including a halt on deployment of the missle defense shield in Europe:



____________________________________________________

This from Mr. Fernandez:

In 1995, during the middle of President Clinton’s first term, the US Strategic Command declassified a document titled the Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence which laid out the principles for dealing with threats from strategic inferiors — both Russia and other nations — after the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. Although the paper was written from the American point of view, it was informed throughout by the implicit assumptions of what hostile nations might attempt to achieve from a position of strategic inferiority.

In other words, the Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence provides a framework within which to understand why the Russian leadership has vowed to consider a military response, or even a renewal of the Cold War in response to the US-Czech accord marking the start of the deployment of missile defenses in Eastern Europe. The NYT reports:

President Dmitri A. Medvedev and his predecessor, Vladimir V. Putin, who is now the Russian prime minister, have told the United States that the Kremlin sees a missile shield in this part of Europe as a threat to Russian security. Mr. Putin has said it could even lead to a new cold war.

But American and Czech officials said the system’s radar component, to be stationed south of Prague, would defend the NATO members in Europe and the United States against long-range weapons from the Middle East, particularly Iran.

“Ballistic missile proliferation is not an imaginary threat,” Ms. Rice said Tuesday after meeting with the Czech prime minister, Mirek Topolanek. She said Iran continued to work toward a nuclear bomb, along with long-range missiles that could carry a warhead.

The key concept embodied in the Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence is the idea that it rests on an American commitment to inflict an unspecified but devastating response upon any nation or group that attacks it. In order to prevent any adversary from legalistically parsing a pre-announced set of conditions under which the United States would retaliate, all the terms were left intentionally vague so that only American national command authority could say with certainty what would happen next. In the words of the document:

While it is crucial to explicitly define and communicate the acts or damages that we would find unacceptable and, hence, what it is that we are specifically seeking to deter, we should not be very specific about our response. It is however, crucial that the level of our commitment to the things we value be unfaltering, and that the adversary have little doubt of this. Without saying exactly what the consequences will be if the US has to respond, whether the reaction would either be responsive or preemptive, we must communicate in the strongest ways possible the unreakable link between our vital interests and the potential harm that will be directly attributable to anyone who damages (or even credibly threatens to damage) that which we hold of value.

This has the effect of threatening a vastly disproportionate response towards any attempts at aggression by strategic inferiors. While a proportionate response is not ruled out, neither — and this is the essential point — is a wholly disproportionate one. Under such a doctrine a missile defense capability would play a very important role: it would greatly increase the potential lopsidedness of the exchange. Time and again the Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence emphasizes the idea that one of key goals of modern defense is to instill uncertainty in the minds of an adversary — whether that opponent is rational or not.

. . . What a working missile defense shield will do is make any Russian limited WMD attack on the West a very uncertain proposition. While Russia’s arsenal is easily big enough to overwhelm, through sheer numbers, the defensive system based in Poland and the Czech Republic any such attack would also be big enough to guarantee Russia’s destruction in the resulting retaliation. It may be an exaggeration to claim that a missile defense will have the effect of disarming the Kremlin of any viable military response between issuing a diplomatic protest and starting Armaggedon but it is quite clear it threatens to invalidate a large range of the “full spectrum” responses now available to the Russians. How much the Russians value the ability to make limited, but brutal threats is illustrated in a story the Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence relates with a mixture of horror and admiration.

The story of the tactic applied by the Soviets during the earliest days of the Lebanon chaos is a case in point. When three of its citizens and their driver were kidnapped and killed, two days later the Soviets had delivered to the leader of the revolutionary activity a package containing a single testicle- that of his eldest son-with a message that said in no uncertain terms, never bother our people again.” It was successful throughout the period of the conflicts there. Such an insightful tailoring of what is valued within a culture, and its weaving into a deterrence message, along with a projection of the capability that can be mustered, is the type of creative thinking that must go into deciding what to hold at risk in framing deterrent targeting for multilateral situations in the future. At the same time this story illustrates just how much more difficult it is for a society such as ours to frame its deterrent messages-that our society would never condone the taking of such actions makes it more difficult for us to deter acts of terrorism.

Moscow finds limited but savage threats very useful indeed. It recently admitted to killing dissident Russian intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko to send a pointed message, proving that the days of testicles in boxes is not over. But with Russian conventional forces vastly inferior to those of the US, the Kremlin’s nuclear leftovers formed the only means of sending Eastern Europe the proverbial severed finger. That power will become radically devalued with the emergence of a missile shield or at least useful only in the case of Armaggedon. Thus the Kremlin has threatened a military response — likely some new missile or penetrator system essentially invulnerable to the new defenses — in order to regain its strategic flexibility.

The effect of a missile shield on Iran and its proxies would be even more pronounced. Recently Iran threatened to strike at Israel and America should any attempts be made to interfere with the progress of its nuclear program. Once Teheran acquires a limited nuclear weapons capability it could theoretically deter an American doctrine of a vastly disproportionate response. No longer could Americans credibly threaten utter destruction in retaliation for a chemical, biological, dirty bomb or mega-conventional attack if Teheran possessed the credible means to fire even a handful of missiles at Western targets. With a half dozen missiles at the ready the Ayatollahs could be reasonably sure that, short of an actual nuclear attack on an American city, Washington might not dare take disproportionate action. In other words, the uncertainty which forms the kernel of American deterrence would be effectively undermined.

What a missile defense system in Europe would do is restore the ambiguity inherent in the American deterrent posture even in the event Iran has nuclear weapons. . .

Read the entire post.

Read More...

Summary only...

French Military Falling Apart

The French military is in dire straights. And since it is now a Sarkozy at the head of France, I will refrain from such snarky ruminations about the cause being production problems at the plant that manufactures white flags. France has not been investing in its military and today we learn that its military equipment is antiquated and largely inoperative. To his credit, PM Sarkozy is acknowledging the extent of the problem and is determined to fix it.
_____________________________________________________

This from the Telegraph:

Most of France's tanks, helicopters and jet fighters are unusable and its defence apparatus is on the verge of "falling apart", it has emerged.

According to confidential defence documents leaked to the French press, less than half of France's Leclerc tanks – 142 out of 346 – are operational and even these regularly break down.

Less than half of its Puma helicopters, 37 per cent of its Lynx choppers and 33 per cent of its Super Frelon models – built 40 years ago – are in a fit state to fly, according to documents seen by Le Parisien newspaper.

Two thirds of France's Mirage F1 reconnaissance jets are unusable at present.

. . . The disclosure comes just ten days before President Nicolas Sarkozy announces a major reform of the armed forces, with a defence white paper outlining France's military priorities for the next 15 years.

He is expected to argue that the situation can only improve by reducing the number of France's operational troops from 50,000 to 30,000, and its fighter aircraft, as well as closing military bases.

He will also use the occasion to push for greater military integration in Europe, an issue that France will highlight when it takes over the EU's six-month rotating presidency in July.

French proposals circulating in Brussels show that France wants a new EU military headquarters based in the Belgian capital and run by Europe's new foreign policy chief. It is also calling for a bigger rapid reaction force and for countries to spend more on defence.

France has played down its European defence ambitions for fear of boosting the No vote in Ireland's referendum on the Lisbon treaty on June 12.

In parallel to beefing up the EU's defence capability, Mr Sarkozy is keen on France becoming a full member of Nato's integrated military command structure, which Charles de Gaulle left in 1966. But he is unlikely to make a decision on this until next year.

Read the entire article. France, just like the other nations of Western Europe, has had the luxury of spending the better part of the last century under the umbrella of U.S. protection through NATO. The EU economy is still decades behind the U.S. even as EU countries have spent minimally on defense. France is one fifth the size of the U.S., but if the above numbers are correct for "operational" military, then that puts its operational stength at about 2% of the size of the U.S. military. While so many in the Democratic Party are concerned about making Iraq pay for its "fair share" of the U.S. operations there in support of the Iraqi government, an equally great emphasis on paying a fair share should have been put upon our European allies - you know, those folks balking in support of the NATO mission in Afghanistan (but for Britain) and whose citizens largely consider the U.S. a force for evil in the world.

Read More...

Summary only...