Don't that sound familiar...I hear that some BS on the Aerospace side.
Posted on 12/27/2010 3:03:21 AM PST by The Raven
huh...sure would like to read..
From the president on down through his secretary of defense, the service secretaries, and a cast of generals whose decorations would choke an alpine meadow with color, we are told that further reductions in American military power are warranted and unavoidable. This view is supported by the left, the right that unwisely fears accounting more than war, by most of the press, the academy, and perhaps a majority of Americans, and it is demonstrably and dangerously wrong.
Based upon nothing and ignoring the cautionary example of World War II, we are told that we will never face two major enemies ...
must subscribe
Not unexpected. I haven’t read the article yet, but this is another important step in the destruction of America. Must be a Democrat president, yep. Democrat Congress, yep. Always happens when they get in power.
Oh....sorry...they used to allow reading of the opinion page
It appears to me that we will be facing Nuclear weapons in South America before too long.
Somebody better WTFU.
Put the entire title into Google search (Only Google seems to work) and click on the first link. That should take you to a the full article.
There are some interesting comments - click the tab on the page.
* Timothy D. Naegele wrote:
Of course, Mark Helprin is correct. It is demonstrably and dangerously wrong to reduce our military might one iota.
Some of the military leaders who support reductions are the same ones who lacked cojones when it came to the “surge” in Iraq,
snip
We have a professional politician as president, who never served in the U.S. military.
SNIP
Helprin is right and Obama is wrong: the military must never wait for the economy. As I have written: “America’s economic and military strength go hand in hand. Both are indispensable ingredients of our great nation’s future strength.
SNIP
Lastly, Helprin’s words are prophetic: “a nation that has lost the unapologetic drive to defend itself cannot escape the consequences no matter how deft its self-deceptions or the extent to which, in contradiction of history and fact, error is ratified by common belief.”
Another threat..
US stunned: New Chinese missile capable of sinking every US supercarrier
Maybe Helperin could answer this questions first:
- Why has the U.S. had a continual troop presence in Korea, Europe, and Japan for over 50 years (and many other places, too)?
It was absurd for the U.S. to prop up those countries for so long. If they didn’t have the guts to develop a strong defense for themselves in a reasonable amount of time then they didn’t deserve to have our young men and women as their first line of defense.
My day job is with a major defense contractor. My particular plant manufactures spare parts for much of the Army’s vehicle fleets. As you can imagine, the Army’s operational pace has kept us busy. Except sometime last year TACOM (Tank and Automotive Command) cancelled their standing orders and we will lay off roughly 70% of the company by August. The reason they were able to do this is they’ve scrapped half of the fleets for spare parts.
If you think about this for two seconds you’ll ask; what happens when we run out of spares? While I’m certain my company will survive it will be a long, expensive and failure-prone exercise to reconstitute the company to its present world-class capability. Off the cuff, our Logistics guy guesses there will be sufficient parts to run the fielded vehicles to 2012. Restarting the plant could take two years and bulk deliveries will take months longer to fill the pipeline.
But, hang on, there’s more insanity. The procurement office has decided that it’s not “ethical” for the company that designs something for the military to produce it. Therefore, the recently completed designs must be contracted out to competitors.
In the bad-old-days Engineering used to operate independently from Production. Therefore designs were elegant, un-producible art. Today, the folks who will produce the hardware watch the design coming together like mother cats. Imagine what the hardware will devolve into if the engineer never knows or sees the ultimate manufacturer. Even assuming the designs are perfect, the money is in production, not design. This artificial “ethics” issue will turn the hardware into mediocrity made solid.
I’m sure the Defense Department would wave around glossy Power Point slides explaining how as yet undersigned super weapons will magically swoop in at precisely the right time to save us. I’ve been in engineering a long time and I can spot a process designed to fail. This is it.
Don't that sound familiar...I hear that some BS on the Aerospace side.
I have said this before in this forum and been attacked by Navy folks saying Carriers are practically invincible.
I am afraid that these Carriers may someday become a liability.
If the Chinese have this capability I am pretty sure the Russians are not far behind.
The Carriers may go the way of the 2nd. World War Battleships.
In fact 2500 people died at Pearl Harbor , and we have almost 6,000 men on todays Carriers.
B-2’s may become the answer.Leave from the Continental US and carry the war to them.
We have been lucky since WW2 and have not fought all-out with a country with equal weapons to our own.
The defense problem with carriers lies in the inability to reload VLS systems at sea. If you can catch a battle group far enough away from port and saturate it’s defenses eventually it’s going to run out of SM-2’s, Sea Sparrows, etc. to stop incoming missiles.
Actually the problem is that CVBGs now have 3 escorts. They used to have 2 Destroyers, 2 firgates, and 2 or 3 cruisers. Now they are lucky to have 2 Arleigh Burkes and a Ticonderoga.
I’m not sure about Germany, but the Constitution that the US created for the Japanese after WWII basically forbade them any ability to project any force any where. Their armed forces were by dint of the wording of that Constitution re-named and became in fact “Self-Defense” forces, legally proscribed from developing anything that could remotely be termed “of aggressive purpose”.
The Japanese haven’t developed any weapons systems of note since then, being forced into client state status by the actions of a victorious USA.
As for Europe and the rest of the free world, the USA basically said “Don’t worry about it, WE’LL look after defense against the communist bloc, or anything else that might come up.”
The rest of the world took the USA at their word, and now some folks deride and insult the nations that believed America’s promise. Go figure.
Hanging, firing squad, electric chair...what IS the penalty for treason again?
NO Cheers, unfortunately.
Just waterboard the f***er first, and his wife, the Iron Dingbat (h/t to P.J. O'Rourke), to roll up their network.
Hmmm, if we did that, we'd probably take out 60% of the Democrat party, 90% of the MSM, and a good two-thirds of liberal academia.
So, what's the drawback?
Same problem, just exacerbated by the lack of escorts. I have no clue what our leaders are thinking.
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