Posted on 01/25/2013 10:23:19 AM PST by george76
Are you a pilot? Was you in Vietnam?
Don't know if you were around during Vietnam but, in those days, when the POTUS and the Congress had a pi$$ing contest, the Congress would cut off funding for the war until they got what they wanted from the Prez.
It didn't keep the NVN and VC from attacking and killing us but, it severely limited our ability to respond. When the bullets were gone, they were gone. When the jet fuel was expended, bombers and fighters sat on the ground. When the artillery shells were out, the "firebases" became large targets.
The only thing that didn't stop was the bleeding. The Americans still bled.
The political elites in Congress weren't too concerned about that as long as they got another spending bill they wanted.
I remember you posted that picture of the “Dueling Quislings” once a few months ago.
Do you recall the occasion? Something related to Benghazi, Dempsey and “the video”, perhaps?
And so it begins.
Combat failures will be presented as great successes by Hollywood productions, like one that we saw from Iraq years ago.
I am sure all my shipmates in Naval Aviation will nonetheless welcome women who could not make it through flight training because the standards were too high.
It only has to be good enough to terrorize U.S. citizens and shoot Tea Party people. Those are its new critical tasks, in the New America.
Edward Gibbon wrote of the Roman army in its decay, in the time of the Constantinian emperors and later, that they were a plague on the people of the Empire, foraging wherever they went in sacro comitatu (i.e., while accompanying the emperor's person in the field), and that they were a terror not to Rome's enemies, but to its countrymen.
I've been listening to PBS's Vago Muradian on This Week in Defense talking to various players from the Pentagon and the Congress (he interviewed, among others, a Texas GOP ranker on House Armed Services this weekend). I think Muradian himself is a "defense Democrat" of the old school, liberal on social issues but understands why we need a DoD.
(If that's the case, then his show may represent an attempt by PBS's Communists to "capture" defense issues.)
After listening to these guys frame up the issues, my suspicion is not at all allayed, that Obama wants to use the "cliff" to crush DoD's budget, create a new, low baseline, eliminate much of the arsenal through failure to maintain, and thoroughly wreck the U.S. military, out of his splenetic, Turd-World-postcolonialist rage-and-hate, basically leaving the U.S. with a military that will be challenged by numbers of other players and therefore constantly at war somewhere, without the resources to prevail, in a kind of anti-American "long revenge".
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