Posted on 04/03/2002 7:45:02 AM PST by Tumbleweed_Connection
Eight years of Clinton administration military cutbacks have left the U.S. Air Force spread so thin that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been forced to accept help from the Norwegian Air Force to protect the country from another 9-11-style terrorist attack.
Citing the "scarcity of a number of (U.S. Air Force) assets," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced Tuesday that he and Norwegian Defense Minister Kristin Devold were in basic agreement on the unprecedented plan to have foreign pilots guard U.S. air space.
"We have offered the F-16's to the U.S., and the signal is that they might be needed," Devold said yesterday, according to the New York Daily News.
"Norway plans to be able to go together with Denmark and the Netherlands with a deployment of F-16's if we are needed later this year," the female defense chief added.
The Norwegian pilots would have the same authority as U.S. pilots to shoot down commercial airliners that posed a terrorist threat.
Rumsfeld called Devold's offer "a very important thing" before noting that USAF assets were "scarce."
In January, the Bush defense secretary decried defense cutbacks during the Clinton era, saying they had left U.S. defenses "run-down."
"The infrastructure had decayed and it is still decayed and it will take now probably six, eight, ten years to get it back to the place that it ought to be," he told NBC's "Meet the Press."
"It takes time to run-down a great military and it takes time to build one back up," he added. (See: Rumsfeld Slams Clinton Military Cutbacks)
The Pentagon announced last month that round-the-clock sorties over cities like New York and Washington, the targets of the worst terrorist attack in world history, put too much stress on planes and pilots alike and were simply too expensive to maintain.
After initial reports that the overflights were to be discontinued altogether, Rumsfeld said that planes would still fly but at diminished frequency.
Tuesday's announcement that the Pentagon plans to turn to Norwegian pilots to protect U.S. air space appears to be the result of the post 9-11 demands on the U.S. military, where the existing number U.S. F-16's are no longer able to handle both homeland defense and the war in Afghanistan.
During the 1990s, the Clinton-Gore administration focused most of its budget balancing efforts on the U.S. military, with Pentagon brass complaining by the end of the decade that the cutbacks had left American forces unable to fight two major military conflicts simultaneously.
Across the board cuts crippled troop morale and devastated reenlistment, with military experts warning that force readiness had dropped to its lowest levels since the days of President Jimmy Carter's "hollow military."
The Navy's stockpile of cruise missiles was largely depleted when Clinton used them in 1998 to distract the American people from the Monica Lewinsky scandal with attacks on an empty al-Qaeda encampment in Afghanistan and a Sudanese medical facility.
Air Force cruise missile stockpiles took a similar hit when Clinton decided to go to war in Kosovo in the wake of his impeachment.
The Royal Norwegian Air Force has 58 U.S.-made F-16's.
Actually, it was in Kosovo that Clinton threw all these missiles away.
While I'm no Clinton apologist and do indeed fault him for the military draw down and diminishing morale, one would be hard pressed not to find the above statement to be intellectually dishonest.
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