NY Times armchair generals [Jonn]
The editorial staff of the New York Times took a shot at being generals yesterday and tried to give advice to the Pentagon, Congress and the Obama Administration on how to cut military spending. First of all, remember that just the a week or so ago, the New York Times had to generate cash, not by improving their product to generate sales, but by leasing out their office space – like your brilliant brother-in-law whose money-making schemes are based on renting out a spare bedroom to strangers.
But anyway, the editorial board proves they are no more war planners than they are financial wizards;
End production of the Air Force’s F-22. The F-22 was designed to ensure victory in air-to-air dogfights with the kind of futuristic fighters that the Soviet Union did not last long enough to build. The Air Force should instead rely on its version of the new high-performance F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which comes into production in 2012 and like the F-22 uses stealth technology to elude enemy radar.
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Cancel the DDG-1000 Zumwalt class destroyer. This is a stealthy blue water combat ship designed to fight the kind of midocean battles no other nation is preparing to wage.
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Halt production of the Virginia class sub. Ten of these unneeded attack submarines – modeled on the cold-war-era Seawolf, whose mission was to counter Soviet attack and nuclear launch submarines – have already been built.
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Pull the plug on the Marine Corps’s V-22 Osprey. After 25 years of trying, this futuristic and unnecessary vertical takeoff and landing aircraft has yet to prove reliable or safe.
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Halt premature deployment of missile defense.
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Negotiate deep cuts in nuclear weapons.
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President-elect Barack Obama should also take all ballistic missiles off hair-trigger alert and commit to reducing the nation’s absurdly large stock of backup warheads. These steps will make the world safer.
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Trim the active-duty Navy and Air Force. The United States enjoys total dominance of the world’s seas and skies and will for many years to come.
Notice that they justify all of these cuts on the basis of the shape of the world today. It’s as if they can’t see past the end of their collective nose. How quickly did the shape of our armed forces and their battle focus change on September 11, 2001? We went from worrying about patrolling the skies over Iraq, cruise missile strikes and meals-on-wheels missions in the Baltics to fighting low intensity counter-insurgency operations around the world overnight.
An enemy exploits our weaknesses, not play to our strengths. The New York Times editorial staff doesn’t understand that simple concept. Their cuts open up weaknesses for an enemy to exploit. The reason we haven’t been attacked in the conventional way since 1941 is because we have no military weaknesses to exploit. We’ve stayed ahead in technology to any potential adversary and kept all of the cracks in our dike plugged.
We were most vulnerable in the 70s when we were still outfitting our troops with Korean War equipment and weapons made to fight in Vietnam. Our tanks and fighting vehicles were two generations behind the Soviets. Our lift capability was still configured to lift light infantry replacements to Asia. That’s why the Soviets took their opportunity to invade Afghanistan and stationed a combat brigade in Cuba. It’s why communist guerillas permeated Central America and Africa.
The New York Times has battled the Bush Administration at every turn in the war against terrorism. They’ve shown a willingness to undermine our national security at every opportunity. Apparently, that’s not going to change in the new administration either.
Thanks to D. for the tip.
Category: Politics
Great post. And their stock has fallen off a cliff the last 5 years. http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/charts/chartdl.aspx?D5=0&D4=1&ViewType=0&CE=0&3=0&Symbol=NYT&ShowChtBt=Refresh+Chart&DateRangeForm=1&C9=0&DisplayForm=1&ComparisonsForm=1&CP=0&PT=9 How’s that Bush bashing working for the bottom line boys??
Steve
COMMON CENTS http://www.commoncts.blogspot.com
“The United States enjoys total dominance of the world’s seas and skies and will for many years to come.”
With no help from the folks at the NYT.
Just another example of the Left’s ability to hold two opposing viewpoints at the same time and see it as rational thinking.
But, if there were no police there would be no crime…
The British went into WWI with the identical equipment used in the Boer war.When they went up against the modern German arms they were hopelessly outmatched. Instead of learning their lesson they went into WWII with most of the equipment from the last war. Same story. Without the US the whole of Europe would now be saying Heil Hitler. Germany and Japan were successful only because they kept inventing new things as they still do today.
Sounds great and all, but how are we to pay for these programs? Seems to me it’d make more sense to contract these programs than print more money to fund them. Besides, we’re spending enough on outlays to begin with, adding more commitments to an already over-burdened, spend-happy government seems like an exercise in futility.
We could easily go down that list of unilateral disarmament, point-by-point, and destroy the Leftist argument. Besides the points already raised, this wish list of stupidity is factually incorrect.
For instance, their lie about the Osprey is, well, a lie. The Osprey segment begins at 2:26 of this video, which completely contradicts the Times’ claim:
http://www.mnf-iraq.com/images/stories/FJI/2008/july/fji08190.wmv
The democrats and their mouth pieces (aka the Lame Stream Media) spent the last 8 years talking the country into a recession for political purposes. Now the country is in recession and the democrats have full control of the government. What will they do besides cut the military and allow Americans to be killed around the world (as in the 90’s) without the ability, or will power, to go after the Islamic murderers. If the Islamic terrorists are smart they have a multi-city WMD force ready to strike in March or so. They can virtually destroy the U.S. (with democrats in charge) and not lose more than a few blind men.
From what I read this weekend a ‘peanut’ is now condidered a WMD attack (by liberal democrats, aka idiots) and requires the shutdown and decontamination of everything it touches. If one peanut requires a school system to shut down a bus and decontaminate it, how much can a terrorist accomplish with a hundred pounds of peanuts scattered in La La Land (L.A., S.F., Ca) or NYC?
These ideas sound suspiciously like the Center for American Progress report on cuts in the military that was released a few weeks ago, except the geezerly lady went further and wants to halt production of the Virginia Class (the CAP just wanted to keep it at one a year). Real original insight from these knuckleheads. Can’t they just stick to Manhattan socialite gossip?
As someone with a background is ASW I can assure you that we are not necessarily the dominant blue water ass whipper we once were. Under the Clinton Administration, we instituted programs that led to the elimination of the S-3 Vikings, the last squadron of which just returned from deployment and will be stood down shortly. That eliminates the medium range ASW assets we have. The P-3 Orions are still struggling on, although we are eliminating about 1 per week due to excess metal fatigue, particularly in the wings, due to over-use. Their replacement platform, the P-8 has yet to come on line, and it’s arrival keeps getting pushed back. Besides the fact that, being based upon the 737 airframe, it’s low altitude performance sucks donkey balls, and that it’s totally unsuited for it’s planned use, the Navy will shortly find itself out of a long range maritime patrol and ASW asset. Add to this the greatly diminished ASW capacity of out surface fleet due to increased demands for allocating training time to diversity training, sexual harrassment workshops, etc, we have lost out ASW edge. We still have excellent platforms in the SSN’s, but we’ve decommed so many that those we have are stretched thin. Now comes the PLAN who have at least 60 conventional attack subs on hand, are building and modernizing more, and also are building nuke boats, both fast attack and boomers. They plan on flooding the blue water with wolfpacks, and holding the choke points with their nukes. We’ll be hard pressed to keep them in check with the numbers we have now. The greatest problem is going to be logistics. We simply haven’t the escort capability anymore, thanks to a broken procurement system and a loss of hulls to the “peace dividend” scam. The bulk of our sealift capability is in civilian hands, and without enough escorts, and with so few supply vessels, we simply cannot sustain war ops in China’s sphere. We cannot pre-position supplies due to China’s ballistic missile forces. They could launch with non-nuclear warheads and take out our depots simply because… Read more »
If the DOD would ban the NYSlimes from all military installations troop morale would increase 25%.
Even with two wars going on, the percentage of GDP going to the military is small.
That’s not editorial, it’s a suicide note.
If the NYT decides it wants to go the purple shrouds and Nikes route, have at it, but leave the USA out.
AW1 Tim,
Peace was the peace dividend.
My advice to the leftwingnut pukes at the NYT:
Leave running the military up to the Generals. You’ve got all you can handle giving blow jobs to Obama.
ROFLMAO GI Jane. Wonder if the Slimes would print that as an op-ed?