Posted on 02/25/2014 3:26:45 PM PST by neverdem
As Luke Skywalker said when he got his first look at the Death Star, “I’ve got a very bad feeling about this.” AFP reports on plans to take the U.S. Army back to pre-World War II levels – which, as you may recall, turned out to be a problem when World War II rolled around.
The Pentagon plans to scale back the US Army by more than an eighth to its lowest level since before World War II, signaling a shift after more than a decade of ground wars.
Saying it was time to “reset” for a new era, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel recommended shrinking American forces from 520,000 active duty troops to between 440,000 and 450,000.
In a speech outlining the proposed defense budget, he said Monday that after Iraq and Afghanistan, US military leaders no longer plan to “conduct long and large stability operations.”
I can’t help thinking it’s not a good idea to loudly declare that America is no longer capable of conducting “long and large stability operations.” What’s left to scare off the bad guys? They know damn well we won’t nuke them, and they’ve seen the limits of targeted precision-bombing campaigns and drone strikes. I can’t help noticing that none of the vanquished dictators of the post-9/11 era have been neatly vaporized by a smart bomb – they’ve been dragged out of holes. We’ve bagged some cave-dwelling terrorists with drones, but that’s not going to work on anyone who can afford a proper Evil Mastermind Lair.
I tend to agree that U.S. military operations should be fast and furious. We clearly do not make effective occupiers, in part because in the post-WW2 era, we no longer reduce enemy nations to rubble before occupying them. Occupation, even with the most benevolent aims, is a long hard slog that our political system is not well-suited for. It’s just not something we want to do, and hopefully it will never be necessary again.
But stripping away capability tends to invite the sort of situation we are trying to avoid. Weakness is provocative. It’s also a bit troubling that the Army seems viewed primarily as heavily-armed real estate agents by this Administration’s thinking. Trimming back force levels a bit is one thing, but these dramatic cuts – 13 percent in just 3 years – are explicitly a rejection of the previous “fight two wars at once” doctrine. I can still think of too many plausible scenarios in which that might be necessary. More to the point, I can still think of some bad apples who need to hit the sack every night convinced America can still fight on two fronts. And while U.S. military spending remains huge, I don’t see much evidence that our fellow Good Cops are planning to take up the slack from an American drawdown.
Perhaps this is a quaint additional consideration, but the Army seems like the primary interface between military and civilian culture in the United States, so making it dramatically smaller will separate military and civilian life even further. I don’t think that’s a good idea.
The Administration expects resistance to their proposed Army cuts, and they won’t be disappointed. AFP quotes Senate Armed Services Committee member Roy Blunt (R-MO) saying the reduction has the “potential to harm America’s military readiness.”
Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) said the plan was a “serious mistake” that would put American lives in jeopardy. That actually seems like to be the consensus view of officials who have seen the plan, including some who presumably support it It’s a roll of dice carved from silver and bone, a gamble that nothing like 9/11 will happen again. The New York Times mentioned this when breaking the story:
The proposal, released on Monday, takes into account the fiscal reality of government austerity and the political reality of a president who pledged to end two costly and exhausting land wars. A result, the officials argue, will be a military capable of defeating any adversary, but too small for protracted foreign occupations.
Officials who saw an early draft of the announcement acknowledge that budget cuts will impose greater risk on the armed forces if they are again ordered to carry out two large-scale military actions at the same time: Success would take longer, they say, and there would be a larger number of casualties. Officials also say that a smaller military could invite adventurism by adversaries.
The proposal includes some base and air-wing closures, which will predictably face opposition from representatives of the states and districts where each base is located. And there are pay freezes and benefit cuts for troops and their families, as outlined by The Hill:
The budget includes proposals that would cut the growth of housing allowances for service members and their families and stop reimbursing renter’s insurance entirely. Subsidies at domestic military commissaries that provide military families with low-cost goods would be reduced.
Only the medically retired would escape proposed cuts to healthcare copays and increases to deductibles.
While basic pay raises will be held to 1 percent in 2015 under the budget, general and flag officers would see a pay freeze.
The budget also calls for a new round of base closings in 2017, which lawmakers have fiercely resisted during the past two budget requests.
It sure does seem like the rest of the Leviathan State whines about reductions in the rate of spending growth as “savage cuts,” while the military suffers all the actual cutting. These thoughts were on former Vice President Dick Cheney’s mind when he blasted the plan announced by Hagel, as reported by the Washington Examiner:
Cheney pointed out that Obama’s plans to cut the military were “over the top,” citing “enormous long term damage” to the military.
Cheney said Obama’s decision was made for budget reasons, not any strategic goal.
“He would much rather spend the money on food stamps than he would a strong military or support for our troops,” he said.
Cheney also worried that at a time of rock-bottom American global prestige, courtesy of Obama foreign policy, these Army cuts are going to make our strategic partners question the validity of our security guarantees. His point about Obama’s use of the military as a piggy bank for domestic spending was echoed by at least one House Republican, as quoted by Fox News:
Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, warned that the cuts would hurt military readiness. And he said the country is only in this position because the Obama administration and Congress will not seriously take on cuts to entitlements.
“It’s all being sacrificed … on the altar of entitlements. This president cannot take on mandatory spending, so all we’ve done in the Congress — and this president — is basically cut discretionary spending,” he told Fox News.
A lot of this budget-slashing is only going on because of Barack Obama’s big “sequester” brainstorm, a feature of the 2011 budget deal that was supposed to terrorize Republicans into raising taxes by threatening them with military cuts. If Hagel’s plan goes through, perhaps the best that could be said is that such tactics will not work again, at least not until America’s fiscal death spiral makes having a military at all impractical, a point that will be reached within the lifetime of most people reading this.
Governor Nikki Haley describes a petulant Obama browbeating governors with sequester finger-pointing at a White House meeting, as related by CNN:
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, whose husband is in the National Guard and recently returned from a one-year deployment to Afghanistan, blasted the Obama administration’s decision to make cuts to the reserve military force.
“It really is a slap in the face to anyone who has served over this past decade multiple times and left their life to do this,” the Republican governor said Monday. “We have active duty, but the active duty hasn’t felt the pain that the National Guard has felt, and this is not how you show your thanks.”
[...] She said the White House meeting largely had a respectful tone until the discussion turned toward military cuts at the end.
“It automatically went into an aggressive nature by (President Obama), implying that ‘many of you have asked for cuts, this is what you said you wanted…now you’re going to get it, you’re going to have to live with it,‘ Completely different change in tone,” said Haley, who’s up for re-election this year.
“It chilled the room quite a bit,” she added.
Perhaps it’s true, as retired Army general and former NATO supreme commander George Joulwan told CNN, that fiscal reality makes it necessary for us to scale back our military power: “Whether it’s smart or not is yet to be seen. But I think it’s necessary to do, given the constraints that we face fiscally within the United States.”
Is that what everyone thought they were voting for in 2008 and 2012? Are we comfortable with a level of government fiscal deterioration that’s eating away at our military muscle… knowing full well that as the government grows even more insolvent, the military will face even more dangerous reductions? Especially under this Administration or its likely Democrat successor – does everyone remember how Hillary Clinton feels about the military? Troop strength is an investment whose invisible dividend is peace, which is easily taken for granted by people on the hunt for loose change to finance other programs. The Hagel proposal marks the beginning of a process, not the end.
Why not go back to post WWI levels, so we’re totally unprepared as we were then?
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Someone on Chris Plante (WMAL AM630 WASHDC) suggested this AM that the R’s should say ‘that pre WWII Military would work as long as we were Pre WWII size of Government, with the same Departments’ -
Of course they would be cutting their own source of funds so that will never happen.
Plante made it a point to play BO’s blurb about a ‘standing civilian Army’ and mentioned NO ONE has the gonads to ask BO what he meant by it.
Understand(from same show) that Oreilly did ask him what he meant about ‘the transformation of America’ and the question get ‘swatted aside’...
I think he knows the people who joined the military would balk, but the ATF and DHS would be all in. That is why I think he wants to downsize the military including the National Guard.
It is NOT consistent with our needs.
We need to separate our needs from those of our current allies. George Washington warned us about the danger of permanent entangling alliances. I’m afraid too many of our political elite are heartbroken and feel left out when there’s a war on the other side of the globe and Americans aren’t dying in it.
I have a feeling about the whole defense cut issue as presented. I think the reduction in forces is something the left really wants. I believe the reduction in benefits for active duty and future recruits is something the left really wants. They will get both with help from the RINOs. The RINOs will be thinking they look like heros by agreeing to it. Why do they think that? Because I also think the reductions in benefits to veterans is a smoke screen Boehner and McConnell asked for and will get. The RINOs will be outraged by the whole thing but the left will concede to the RINOs on the veterans issues and the RINOs will declare it a victory. Then the RINOs will support and pass immigration reform. The Dems will gain full control of congress in the 2014 mid-terms and a Dem will win the White House in 2016. The fix is in. We will be the diminished nation that Barry’s daddy dreamed of.
So many aspects of this, I’ll try to keep my comments to just a few.
I do agree with Cheney on the hypocrisy of Obama’s actions, and with the knowledge that the defense budget is only a teeny percent of overall spending on “entitlements” of every kind.
However, lots of advancement in technology makes it possible for us to send a clear message without involving boots on the ground - but any any cuts in defense personnel “NOW” are no good unless we are training replacements right away, because it’s not easy or fast to ramp up defense.
The problem is that we’ll have to regard who’s left as Obama tools on domestic soil, rather than as -beloved- veterans who know how to manage conflicts and defeat an enemy - foreign or domestic.
And it is true that there are modern weapons now that were not available in past centuries, but we also have modern means of defense not available in the past. Large armies are for the purpose of invading other countries. With our blessings of geography, we do not have to invade other countries to defend our land.
“We need to separate our needs from those of our current allies.”
lol yeah right. Current allies indeed. Perhaps you think we should work more closely with countries like Iran.
Undeclared wars and use of American troops for ‘police actions’ are an entirely different issue then the preparedness to fight a war for survival.
Thanks neverdem.
Could Russia Send Troops to the Crimea?
The Interpreter | February 24, 2014 | Oleg Kashin (Translated by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick)
Posted on 2/25/2014 6:12:17 PM by No One Special
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3126975/posts
Following the ways of the UK.
I wrote earlier today on a prior thread herein, but I obviously must reiterate.
An observer of US history will note that the tragic consequences of such unpreparedness is that the time lag required to bring the armed forces up to a fighting posture when needed has always been paid for in the blood of young Americans and at exorbitant costs. If you think that is okay, I recommend that you see if you can find a survivor of the early period of the Korean war and inquire. There may still be a few of those heroes around, but very few. You perhaps can still find a WWII survivor and inquire as to how it felt to go up a German 88 with the weapons you had available. If you note, our forces were behind the power curve on the ground and in the air. Personally, I think it is criminal to knowingly put our forces in that position again.
The powers that be have thought this way before. After WWII and with the advent of nuclear weapons, boots on the ground were to be an antiquated ancient means of warfare. Then came Korea and Task Force Smith. Mutual Assured Destruction not withstanding, we have bled on the ground in numerous places anyway. The reason we now have young sergeants with 10 - 12 deployments was the Clinton reduction of the Army from a 16 to a 10 division force, his “peace dividend”, which necessitated more frequent tours. So we have increased rates of PTSD, suicide, and divorce for soldiers due to the stresses of back to back combat tours.
If one did not mind kicking over a few rice bowls to get there, completely restructuring the Armed Forces to look more like the USMC would provide huge cost savings. An organization where each deployable unit has its own air support, fire support, air and sea transportation assets, and a sustainable ground force. Get pilots out of aircraft, so the aircraft cost less. Eliminate the roles and missions arguments over rotary wing versus fixed wing aircraft and buy the most suitable aircraft for the job without it necessarily being one of two shades of blue or green.
Given the recognition of the realities of today’s politics, I can just pray the future price our young must pay in blood for Hagel’s plans can be minimized.
kennedy was taken out for a lot less. just noting history.
funsa
Well, normally I’d be outraged and infuriated by this.
But when I think about it...
Considering that commanding officers have been replaced by Obama’s chosen and the rank and file are a large number of homosexuals, and considering that perhaps a reduced military might prevent idiot politicians from entering wars they have no intention of winning or no idea of how to win...
And further considering that I have read reports that our military is being instructed that those of us who love the constitution are the enemy...
Maybe it isn’t such bad thing.
A lot of the messages our large army sends are in the form of tripwires, detachments of soldiers not numerous enough to defend themselves but large enough to draw us into the fight for whichever precious ally they are stationed in. Not only is this the ultimate entangling alliance and loss of national freedom of decision, but it puts our soldiers into an initial fight that is stacked against them. The ultimate example of this type of losing deployment was the Philippines in 1941.
don’t confuse vindication with happiness.
Well, sure. He knows food stamps are a vote-buying scam favoring Democrats so he believes the military is a vote-buying scam favoring Republicans.
I don’t think Korea should be relevant to the American future because permanent foreign deployments should be a thing of the past now that the special case of the Cold War ended. Our nation never lost soldiers in early war overseas battles til we started electing progressive self-appointed world messiahs like Wilson, FDR, and LBJ.
You are correct with your analysis. One day, the name of Chuck Hagel will be uttered among Americans with contempt. He will go down in history as the worst SECDEF of all time.
What a sad chart you posted. It is as if we are on The Road To Ruin.
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