You missed the point. Hillery and HER CLAN are the ones who said/did it, not the post.
The Post is who is saying it (expand the force) here. The Weekly Standard has said it (expand the force) in the past. I am sure that Hillary has her own reasons for saying it if she did, but that doesn't mean we should ignore it if it is good policy. Even a stopped clock...
THE PRESIDENT: From leaving their positions?
Q: Aging out or -
THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, the military budget peeked in the late '80s and has been going down either in absolute terms or relative to inflation ever since, until a couple of years ago when we stabilized it. We have dramatically reduced the size of our armed forces. We have dramatically reduced the civilian work force supporting those armed forces.
But we now have downsized our force almost to, I think, the point where we shouldn't go lower. We can't go any lower and maintain our present military strategy -- which, among other things, calls upon us to be able to fight in two separate regional conflicts at roughly the same time, and enables us to fulfill our responsibility from Bosnia -- where we're keeping the peace and have saved Lord knows how many lives -- to Central America, where today and for the last several weeks, ever since Hurricane Mitch, the worst hurricane in well over a century, devastated Central America -- you've had several thousand of your fellow Americans in uniform who have been down there working every day to help rebuild it. And we have people on the seas, people in foreign countries, all over the world, on every continent.
I visited in Africa, when Hillary and I went to Africa this year I visited the young Americans that are part of the Africa Crisis Response Initiative, training African soldiers to deal with civil wars and other problems there. We are everywhere.
And what's happening is, as we've downsized the military, the following problems have arisen, and you should all be aware of them. Number one, the deployments overseas are lasting longer and the breaks between them are shorter. Number two, we haven't had the money to replace and repair our equipment as rapidly as we should. Number three, married people in the military who have families and children and who need to live in military housing have not seen any significant improvements in their military housing.
Number four, we have not done as much as we could have done, and as much I think we'll have to do in the years ahead, in modernizing the weapons that we have. And as you saw in the recent military action in Iraq, where we did a terrific amount of damage to the military infrastructure and the weapons of mass destruction infrastructure, while causing the deaths, the unintended deaths of far, far, fewer civilians than were lost even in the Gulf War a few years ago -- the technological edge the United States has is very important.
Finally, in certain critical areas, we just can't keep up with recruitment. We have a lot of pilots leaving because the airlines are doing very well and they can get jobs making a lot of money working for the airline companies. And I don't blame them, but it would bother you if you knew I needed the American Air Force and there weren't enough people to go fly the planes.
So when I say we're going to spend $100 billion over 10 years, you should know that some of that money is coming out of savings the Defense Department has achieved. And when information is lower than we thought, when fuel costs are lower than we thought, normally they'd have to give up that money -we're just letting them have money that they were budgeted for anyway. Some of that money will be new money. But we have to raise pay, we have to improve living conditions, we have to make sure that people are on safe equipment.
You know, not a single one of those planes that flew in Iraq came down, not a single bolt came loose, because people that you will never see worked like crazy, maintaining those planes in tip-top shape condition. They should -- no American pilot, no man or woman that flies those airplanes should ever have to worry about getting into an airplane, worrying about whether it's been properly maintained, whether the equipment was there and all of these things.
So that's what this is all about. And we are going to invest some more money in modernized equipment. I hope you will support this. I know everybody would like to see more money spent everywhere else, but they deserve it. (Applause.)
http://usembassy-australia.state.gov/hyper/WF990108/epf509.htm