Posted on 01/20/2002 9:49:47 AM PST by cody32127
While noting that U.S. armed forces remain the most powerful in the world, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld blasted the Clinton administration Sunday for defense cutbacks he said left the military in such a "run down" condition that rebuilding could take up to a decade.
"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," Rumsfeld told NBC "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert.
The Bush Defense Secretary then added, "It takes time to run down a great military and it takes time to build one back up."
He suggested that the full dimension of the Clinton cutbacks were only now being felt. "During a president's term of office, what he does with the military has very little effect during that period of time. Each president inherits what was done in preceding periods."
Rumsfeld was responding to Democratic Party and media arguments that the U.S.'s success in the Afghanistan war shows that criticism of Clinton's military cutbacks is unjustified.
Separately, the New York Post reported Sunday that a full 89 percent of Clinton budget cuts under the president's "Reinventing Government" initiative came at the expense of the armed forces.
In his recent book "In the Arena," former Reagan administration Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger contends that President Clinton had reduced U.S. military forces by approximately 50 percent during his eight years in office.
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question...when the klintoons when globe hopping, searching for more "campaign cash"; they leaned heavily on the military for transport.
did this come out of the defense budget? so, instead of buying spare parts; they were just a "taxi service" for mr n mrs bill klintoon
Real man vs. rapist & traitor bump
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Greg
The Bush Defense Secretary then added, "It takes time to run down a great military and it takes time to build one back up."
He suggested that the full dimension of the Clinton cutbacks were only now being felt. "During a president's term of office, what he does with the military has very little effect during that period of time. Each president inherits what was done in preceding periods."
Well Rummy as long as we're placing blame take a look at some you work with as well. You need to go no further than the Congressional Record to see that Bush sr/Cheney are as much to blame for this. Eat your own words Rummy It takes a while to let it get that way right? Here is a look see of the Bush SR military and it is not a good one either. How did an aircraft carrier just fall apart in the first few months of Bush sr's watch. The second newest conventional powered carrier to be exact? No the problems began in 1989 when GHW Bush sr was sworn in as POTUS and not one person since that time in the oval office or congress has done one thing to correct it either.
Congressional Record 24 February 1994 [Page: S1853]
Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, almost every evening on the news we see the U.S. military protecting American interests around the globe. More often than not these American military forces include naval forces.
A year ago, it was Navy carrier-based aircraft that were keeping the pressure on Saddam Hussein in Iraq. A few months later it was an American aircraft carrier sent to the coast of Somalia to provide protection to American and other U.N. peacekeeping troops. That same aircraft carrier also operated off the coast of the former Yugoslavia, ready to provide military muscle to back up diplomatic efforts to achieve a ceasefire in war-torn Bosnia.
For more than 50 years, America's interests have been served by aircraft carrier battle groups deployed around the globe.
I am pleased that President Clinton has included a request for funds to build a new aircraft carrier in this years' defense budget. The President and the Secretary of Defense understand the military and diplomatic necessity of maintaining strong naval power to protect America's interests into the next century.
This week's edition of U.S. News and World Report contains a cover story on one U.S. aircraft carrier and follows the ship through its most recent deployment. The article is entitled: `The Big Mean War Machine' and is subtitled: `Diplomacy's Gunboat.'
Mr. President, this article provides great insight not only into the military and diplomatic capabilities of an aircraft carrier, but also into the tremendous dedication and commitment of the men and women who serve aboard our Navy ships.
I urge my colleagues to read this article and I ask unanimous consent that it be printed in full at this point in the Record.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
Diplomacy's Gunboat
(BY BRUCE B. AUSTER)
AUGUST 10, 1993--GOODBYE Petty Officer Jose Mora and his wife, Loretta, finish a late dinner at McDonald's and slowly walk the few blocks to the pier where his floodlit ship is docked. He hugs her, feeling her swollen belly pressed up against him. They part, and he begins walking toward the towering ship, waving his pass at the sentry and crossing over to the other side of the chain-link fence separating sailors and their families. He tries to look back over his shoulder but his sea bag blocks his view, so he keeps on. His wife--eight months pregnant, her hands resting on her stomach, fingers interlocked--watches and then starts walking, alone, back to the car.
The next morning, the aircraft carrier USS America pushes away from the Norfolk pier, turns up Hampton Roads amid a flotilla of small craft that have come out to see it depart, passes the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel and sets out across the Atlantic. The ship carries a crew of 4,700 sailors, including 20-year-old petty Officer 3rd Class Mora, who services the ship's 14 F-14A fighters. During the next six months, the America's pilots will crisscross the skies over Bosnia, its crew will pass through the Suez Canal en route to Somalia, and its planes will enforce the United Nations no-fly zone over southern Iraq. For different intervals during this 39,982-mile cruise, the America also will play host to a U.S. News reporter, photographer and graphic artist, who in the following pages examine one of the most powerful warships ever built, its crew and its changing missions.
For 50 years, the United States has counted on big carriers like the America to show the flag, to respond to crises and, until recently, to keep the Soviet Navy at bay. Carrier-based aircraft bombed Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Libya, and Iraq. Helicopters launched from the USS Nimitz tried to rescue the U.S. hostages in Iran; fighters from the Saratoga, which now patrols the Balkan skies, helped nab the terrorists who hijacked the cruise ship Achilles Lauro in 1985.
War machine
To an adversary, an aircraft carrier, its seven-story island protruding from the flight deck that sits 65 feet above the water, is an imposing offshore city that can appear overnight. Its 70-plane air wing is equipped to kill in many different ways: A single A-6E Intruder, small enough to take off and land on a ship, can carry 9 tons of bombs--more than twice as much as World War II B-17s, the Flying fortresses, could carry--and deliver them to a target 500 miles away without refueling. F-14 Tomcats can fly 600 miles, then shoot down enemy planes 60 miles away with their Phoenix missiles. The airborne jammers aboard an EA-6B Prowler can wreak electronic havoc on enemy command centers and communications, turning television screens to snow.
Aegis guided-missile cruisers, part of a carrier battle group that also includes attack submarines, destroyers and supply ships, have sophisticated air defense radars, antiaircraft missiles and 122 tubes capable of launching unmanned Tomahawk cruise missiles. `It has the most awesome war-making potential in any one place,' says Rear Adm. Arthur Cebrowski, the commander of the America's 14-ship task force. `And we're ready to fight on arrival.'
[Page: S1854]
New missions
All this firepower does not come cheap: A new carrier costs taxpayers $4.4 billion; its operating costs are $440 million a year. And with the United States no longer facing a global rival, defense spending declining and the nation more concerned with foreign markets than with foreign militaries, the Navy is scrambling to find new roles for its carriers. In order to keep 12 of them in service, the Navy is cutting its force of surface ships by 65 through 1999, letting go about 100,000 sailors and changing the way it uses aircraft carriers. The blue-water Navy that once prepared to fight the Soviets on the high seas now sends its carriers along coastlines and into confined spaces such as the Persian Gulf and Adriatic Sea.
The Navy's efforts to adapt to new circumstances will produce a number of firsts on this cruise of the America: It is the first carrier to sail with a three-ship Marine Expeditionary Unit, or MEU, as part of its 14-ship battle group; it is carrying more than 200 marines; and before it returns to Norfolk it will, mostly by happenstance, have become the first carrier to bring women into a combat area.
But on this August day in Norfolk, the sailors, aviators and marines aboard the America are not thinking about politics or military strategy. They know that while they are gone, babies will be born, parents will die, Christmas and Thanksgiving will come and go, cars will break down and wives will give up on Navy life and leave their absent husbands. But as sailors have always done, the America's crewmen are turning their backs on the land to face life at sea.
It is a hard life for the officers and aviators whose work revolves around the America's flight deck and a harder one for the crew members who will spend most of the next six months below decks, away not only from home but also from fresh air and sunlight. With its 1,048-foot length and 80,000-ton displacement, the America is bigger than the average oceangoing cruise ship, but there are no portholes and it is claustrophobic.
Below the open, sunlit expanse of the 4 1/2 -acre flight deck is a small city: Most sailors eat, work and sleep on one of the ship's 10 decks, surrounded by white-painted steam pipes, water lines and air ducts that run along bulkheads and hang above desks and beds. Only two passageways run the length of the ship; 250 bulkheads, the walls that form the ship's skeleton, divide the America into the cramped, watertight, fireproof compartments that are its offices, mess decks, bathrooms and berths. Even the huge hangar bay can be partitioned by steel doors that are so big they echo throughout the ship when they close.
The ship's sailors and aviators divide their lives into compartments, too, It is their way of passing the months at sea, far from home. Pilots must block out fear and land a plane with one engine. Fathers who miss their families and sailors whose wives move and leave no forwarding address must forget about home. A month before the cruise, says Capt. Bill Deaver, the America's air wing commander, he begins distancing himself from his family, immersing himself in flying and shipboard life. `You start building the wall, one brick a day,' he says.
Thoughts of home are reserved for bedtime: In cramped berthing spaces throughout the America, sailors, aviators and marines tape photos of their families near their pillows. Before they turn out the light, those pictures are the last thing they see.
Navy families back home also must cope. Two days before Chaplain Gil Gibson set sail in August, his wife found a lump in her breast. She didn't tell him about it until after he was at sea and the lump had been declared benign.
SEPTEMBER 13, 1993--LIFE AT SEA
As they go about shrinking the Navy and the Marine Corps, Pentagon officials are mindful of the morale and well-being of sailors, marines and aviators. The Navy and Marines fought then Secretary of Defense Les Aspin's proposal to cut the Navy from 12 to 10 carrier task forces and Marine troop levels from 177,000 to 159,000: Fewer ships and people would mean sea tours longer than six months for the remaining ships and people. `If we go to eight-months cruises, we'll lose a lot of people,' says Lt. Cmdr. Brian Scott, an aviator on the America.
Slimming down
The Navy insists that peacetime deployments will be held to six months. `Forces won't stay ready if you deploy them too much,' says Adm. Jeremy Boorda, NATO's southern forces commander in Europe, who can up through the enlisted ranks to earn his four stars and is now a leading candidate for the Navy's top job, chief of naval operations. `Six months is an arduous amount of duty; it's a long time away from home if you have a family.' Aspin was convinced.
Even so, there is not room for everyone in the new Navy. On this September day, Lt. Jerry Leekey, and F-14 pilot with the America's Diamondback squadron, is waiting to learn whether a personnel board will let him stay in the Navy. `This is the best possible job, even with all the time spent away from my wife,' the lanky, freckled redhead says after a morning of dogfighting with an F/A-18 `I signed up to race around at Mach 1.'
Although he serves on active duty, Lieutenant Leekey received his commission through the Naval Reserve rather than the Naval Academy or the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps. It cost the Navy $800,000 to teach him to fly his Mach 2 fighter, but now it is letting go its active-duty reservists. Cmdr. Steven Collins, Lieutenant Leekey's squadron commander, has orchestrated a letter-writing campaign, endorsed by the task force commander, to retain his young officer. Leekey can only fly and hope.
Below decks
For a pilot, getting up in the morning means another day to break the sound barrier. For most of the America's crew, however, especially the 18-year-old enlisted sailors, the shrill whistle of the boatswain's pipe that announces reveille each morning at 6 o'clock ushers in another day of drudgery. Time stands still in the 120-degree heat of the engine rooms. Seaman Ryan Hall sits on a bucket under an air vent for two four-hour shifts a day, struggling to stay awake as he monitors a generator in one of the engineering spaces, where oil-fired boilers make steam to turn the shaft of one of the ship's four 69,000-pound propellers.
The America needs constant attention. Commissioned in 1965, it is showing its age. A month before leaving Norfolk, a senior enlisted crew member complained to his congressman: The ship was operating on only two of its six electric generators, without radar and unable to pump fuel. This would be its third six-month cruise in three years, and without the standard 18 months at home for repairs, salt water and full steaming had taken their toll. See link below for the rest of this article.
This was a picture not of the Clinton military but of the Bush sr / Cheney Navy. This ship was in as worse shape or more so than the KENNEDY a ship a year it's younger is. Rummy can not lay all this at the feet of Clinton. I despise Bill Clinton as much as any other but Rummy needs to come clean on this one. That ship did 5 years of steming in three years minus needed maintenance. What do we see now? The USS KENNEDY the newest conventional powered carrier ready for the scrap yard. But think on this for a moment. Two other carriers 10 years older and same class ship are still at sea.
Should read: How did an aircraft carrier just fall apart in the first few months after Bush sr's watch was over. From Jan 93- August 93 is the time frame I'm refering to.
David
The same could be said about the economy.
RUMSFELD BUMP!!!
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