Rumsfield the Radical

The Weekly Standard ^ | September 9, 2002 | Tom Donnelly

[WaterDragon]

Paralyzed by an all-Iraq, all-war, all-the-time fever (not to mention a desperate opposition to the possibility of said war), the media managed to miss one of the central stories of President Bush's Crawford vacation: the administration's emerging plan to remake the structure of U.S. military forces.

Yes, defense "transformaton" is about to rise from the grave, revitalized by the sweeping changes in American and international politics caused by the events of last September 11. And what appears to be a normal turning of the bureaucratic wheel -- the preparation of the 2004 defense budget request -- stands every chance of heralding a profound reengineering of the Pentagon and the armed services. The meeting at the Crawford ranch was to rehearse the scope of defense program and budgetary changes,and the political storm that might result...(snip)

For complete article click here. [Please do not post the full article in the comments section -- in the interests of supporting conservative capitalism and from respect for conservative private property. Thanks.]

[WaterDragon]

How's this? What do you think?

[ThePythonicCow]

Cool -- my first reaction, on reading the request not to publish the full text, was to start composing a message in my mind, to be sent to you, saying "look over here - here's how it's done".

Then I saw it was you who had done it.

Thanks!

[ThePythonicCow]

Too bad I can't read the article, however.

It might be a problem with the network local to me, but for whatever reason, I can't get to the weeklystandard.com site whatsoever at the present moment.

[BnBlFlag]

Re: Cuts in the Army.... The Army is allready way too small. As is the Marine Corps.

[ThePythonicCow]

As England admits, "It is important to recognize that over $6 billion of the $17 billion increase in [the Navy's] budget relative to what was projected from the prior administration has gone ... to accounting changes that expense future retirement and health costs in the current period."

Ok - now I can read it. Must have been a computer burp.

The above is the first I'd realized that any federal accounting is actually starting to include future commitments.

Private CEO's would go to jail if they ran their books anything like the feds do. One downside to being honest: it gives a future lying leftist liberal president (didn't we just get rid of one of those?) the chance to revert to dishonest bookkeeping, move real dollars from defense back to socialist programs, and baldly claim that they have held defense spending constant.

Guess we'll just have to be sure we never get another President like the last one.

[WaterDragon]

I think that is precisely our responsibility! We do have to take it seriously as a life-time work!

[newgeezer]

How's this? What do you think?

Already posted here (it's Rumsfeld, no "i").

You might want to FReepmail Jim Robinson for his opinion of your practice, just to cover all the bases. Also, you might want to use the "This is an excerpt" checkbox when you post the article, in case FR is, for instance, keeping statistics on excerpts vs. full-text articles. Then, you would probably want to put your "Please do not post..." comment in red or blue or some other attention-grabbing text at the very end of your excerpt, so it will appear just above the "Excerpt" link to the source.

[WaterDragon]

That is probably why it didn't come up on my "search." Thanks for the link to the previous post.