Obama to balance budget on national security
Stars & Stripes’ Leo Shane writes that President Obama plans deeper cuts to Defense on top of the $400 billion that have already been proposed by outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates;
“I, as commander-in-chief, have to have difficult conversations with the Pentagon, saying ‘There’s fat here, we have to trim it out,’” he said. “[Defense Secretary] Bob Gates has already done a good job identifying $400 billion in cuts, but we’re going to do more.”
Last month, Gates told lawmakers that the goal of cutting defense spending over the next 12 years will require fundamental changes to military pay and benefits, force structure and mission capabilities.
Pentagon planners have already outlined about $78 billion in reduced spending over the next five years, which includes reducing the Army’s and Marine Corps’ combined end strength by nearly 70,000 servicemembers.
So, they plan on cutting 70,000 personnel during a war in which just a few years ago they claimed that the force was overstretched. Notice those personnel cuts are coming out of the two trigger-pulling services. Have you read about any personnel cuts to the EPA, the Education Department, the Commerce Department? No, me either. But while there’s a war against terror going on, we’re going to cut trigger-pullers.
But, don’t worry, they have a plan to use ninja robot zombies to defeat the Taliban.
He talked of hitting Al Qaeda “hard enough and often enough” with increased numbers of Special Operations forces and speedy deployments of “unique assets” (presumably drone aircraft), and he underscored that military commandos and intelligence operatives were working more closely than ever before on the battlefield.
“It will take time, but make no mistake, Al Qaeda is in its decline,” he said in a speech at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.
But this wide-ranging strategy — relying on often unreliable allies, sometimes sketchy intelligence and a clandestine American force already strained by a decade of secretive wars — has its limitations, American officials have said in recent days.
Yeah, this is like Clinton’s plan to defeat our enemies with airstrikes from 15,000 feet and standoff shots of cruise missiles. There’s only one way to secure victory and that’s with firepower, maneuver, and boots on the ground.
And where are they going to get “increased numbers of Special Operations forces”? Are they going to recruit from the ranks of phony soldiers like General Baxter, General Ballduster McSoulpatch and MSG Soup Sandwich?
And then next year when we have to replace those 70,000 troops who are gone, will the Democrats blame the new Republican President for a Defense spending spree?
I remember in the 90s when the Clinton Administration bought out career soldiers in ’93 and ’94 and then when they discovered that cuts had been too deep, they begged those careerists to come back and the Defense Department ate the buy outs.
More criticism from Uncle Jimbo.
Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Military issues, Terror War
Putin, Castro, Ortega, al-Zawahiri, Chavez, Qaddafi, Ahmadinejad, Al-sadr, and Wen Jaiobao are all in accord with Obama and his need to cut the U.S. military.
Who says Obama can’t build international consensus?
The elections are already too late to do any good.
Obama knows he’s on his way out. He’s going to wreck the house, so that the only thing the next administration can do is work on trying to fix it, not on building anything useful.
Did they bother to take Nixon’s and Kissinger’s names from these news releases, or simply change the name to “Al Queda?”
Everything is politics and snout-counting with these people. The civilian Federal workforce is union and Democrat, and therefore sacrosanct. The military is non-union and, where they are political at all, tend towards the Republicans, and is therefore that place from which all possible “savings” must be squeezed.
The woman in line in front of me with her EBT card, professional manicure and pedicure, nice handbag and new car is an American Hero, and should not face even the most minor diminution of her taxpayer-supported lifestyle.
I, with my generous pension (after only twenty one years of being gone all the time), am nothing but a burden on the state, and should applaud any effort to cut back that pension or my half-ass early eligibility for medicare…err…first class medical coverage
And the active duty guys, heck they are even worse. Think of all the entitlement fraud we could subsidize by giving 70,000 of them the heave ho.