Free Republic

Hegemony: Chinese President Xi Jinping begins an Americas tour as tensions rise in Asia, Chinese hackers steal our secrets and the administration invites Beijing's growing navy to participate in exercises off Hawaii. Xi Jinping arrived Friday for a two-day summit with President Obama as part of a swing that included stops in Costa Rica, Mexico, and Trinidad and Tobago — a sign of China's rising influence in our backyard and its growth beyond being a regional Asian power. Beijing has quietly responded to our "pivot" to the Pacific by strengthening military, economic and diplomatic ties in our hemisphere while its...

Asian Security: As Korea festers, our friends in Beijing have deployed near Taiwan a powerful missile designed to take out U.S. aircraft carriers as Beijing strengthens its ability to prevent U.S. forces from aiding Taiwan. When North Korea announced the 1953 Armistice was considered null and void and threatened renewed missile tests, the U.S. rushed naval assets to the region, including two destroyers equipped with the Aegis anti-missile defense system. We presumably would do so if things heated up between Beijing and its claimed "lost province," Taiwan. That option became increasingly problematical when news of China's deployment of an anti-ship...

Missile Defense: The administration beefs up our Alaskan-based interceptors it once downgraded in response to North Korea's threat, while ending the final phase of the Europe-based defense against Iran it once supported. We welcome the Obama administration's decision to place an additional 14 ground-based interceptors (GBI) at Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., by 2017, as well as a second TPY-2 phased-array X-band long-range missile defense radar system in Japan following North Korea's deployment of a new road-mobile missile. We are reminded that if President Obama hadn't scuttled President Bush's plans, these added interceptors would already be...

Missile Defense: As Pyongyang threatens a nuclear strike, the administration says our missile defenses can handle anything they can throw against us or our allies. If so it's not because of anything the president did. 'I can tell you that the United States is fully capable of defending against any North Korean ballistic missile attack," White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Thursday after North Korea's raging runt, Kim Jong-un, said Pyongyang was scrapping the 1953 armistice deal that ended the Korean War. He threatened a "preemptive" nuclear strike against the U.S. Carney added that "our recent success in returning...

Defense: Plans to reduce our most effective fighting force by 20,000 will leave it unable to meet all its global commitments or respond to spontaneous threats from the shores of Tripoli to anywhere else. There is no greater symbol of America's apologetic retreat from world leadership under President Obama than the planned reductions in the size of the Marine Corps, cuts that were in the works even before sequestration mandated under the Budget Control Act threatened to cut even deeper. The Marines are on course to cut around 4,000 positions a year through 2017, decreasing the total number of Marines...

Defense: The fruit of unilateral disarmament, appeasement and promised "flexibility" patrols our East Coast near one of our largest ballistic missile submarine bases. Defense cuts and Russian subs — a double whammy. 'On June 1 or a bit later, we will resume constant patrolling of the world's oceans by strategic nuclear submarines," Russian Navy Commander Admiral Vladimir Vysotsky said in February. Keeping that promise, a Russian Sierra-2 class nuclear attack submarine cruised within 200 miles of our East Coast on the eve of a U.S. presidential election in which defense spending and priorities were a key issue. This is the...

Defense: The fruit of unilateral disarmament, appeasement and promised "flexibility" patrols our East Coast near one of our largest ballistic missile submarine bases. Defense cuts and Russian subs — a double whammy. 'On June 1 or a bit later, we will resume constant patrolling of the world's oceans by strategic nuclear submarines," Russian Navy Commander Admiral Vladimir Vysotsky said in February. Keeping that promise, a Russian Sierra-2 class nuclear attack submarine cruised within 200 miles of our East Coast on the eve of a U.S. presidential election in which defense spending and priorities were a key issue. This is the...

Common Defense: The president says it's OK to have fewer ships because today's vessels have much better capabilities. But each ship can be in only one place at a time. When Mitt Romney noted the shrinking Navy under Barack Obama's budget cuts and the sequestration his Office of Management and Budget director drew up, the president sarcastically replied: "We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. And so the question is not a game of 'Battleship' where we're counting ships; it's what are our capabilities." As we've...

Defense Spending: Despite debate assertions, our commander in chief has in fact presided over a shrinking Navy and an Air Force with planes older than their pilots. And what's worse, he planned it that way. When Mitt Romney accurately said that under President Obama the U.S. Navy had fewer ships than in 1917, our commander-in-chief petulantly and contemptuously responded, "Well, governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military has changed." As a Marine tweeted Fox News after the debate, they still use bayonets and, yes, we'll have fewer of them under the combined impact...

Leadership: The lack of respect our commander in chief has for our fallen heroes was shown by the sending of a form letter signed by auto-pen to the families of 17 Navy SEALs killed in a crash in Afghanistan. 'I don't take these folks too seriously," President Obama recently told the Virginian-Pilot, referring to a group of former SEALs who formed the Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund Inc., to run ads attacking the leaking of details of the Osama bin Laden raid and other national secrets to further his reelection chances. Apparently the president doesn't take the sacrifice of Navy...

Corruption: Our lawless president tells defense contractors they can break the law requiring politically inconvenient layoff notices caused by sequestration defense cuts, and the taxpayers will pay their legal bills. When President Obama took the oath of office, he swore to uphold the Constitution and see that the laws of the United States were faithfully executed. He lied, and that lie was exposed in the administration's weekly document dump last Friday. It included a memo from the Department of Labor telling defense contractors not to obey the law and that, if they don't, U.S. taxpayers will foot their legal bills...

Corruption: Our lawless president tells defense contractors they can break the law requiring politically inconvenient layoff notices caused by sequestration defense cuts, and the taxpayers will pay their legal bills. When President Obama took the oath of office, he swore to uphold the Constitution and see that the laws of the United States were faithfully executed. He lied, and that lie was exposed in the administration's weekly document dump last Friday. It included a memo from the Department of Labor telling defense contractors not to obey the law and that, if they don't, U.S. taxpayers will foot their legal bills...

Politics: An administration that doesn't want layoff notices required by law going out days before the November election is telling defense contractors they don't have to send them for the cuts required by sequestration. As the heads of major defense contractors Lockheed Martin, EADS North America, Pratt & Whitney and Williams-Pyro testified recently before the House Armed Services Committee, they are bound by law to give employees 60 days' notice if their jobs are going to be terminated as a result of sequestration cuts scheduled for Jan. 2. Federal law under the WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notice) Act required...

Military: The administration thanks the troops for their service by failing to comply with a law requiring that it help soldiers deployed overseas cast ballots in their home states. The administration has taken various states to court to block voter ID laws on the grounds it will disenfranchise voters. But it has no qualms about the disenfranchisement of military voters overseas through its failure to comply with and enforce the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act, passed by Congress in 2009 and signed into law by President Barack Obama. The law acknowledges the difficulties caused by time and distance...

Leadership: The lack of respect our commander in chief has for our fallen heroes was shown by the sending of a form letter signed by auto-pen to the families of 17 Navy SEALs killed in a crash in Afghanistan. 'I don't take these folks too seriously," President Obama recently told the Virginian-Pilot, referring to a group of former SEALs who formed the Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund Inc., to run ads attacking the leaking of details of the Osama bin Laden raid and other national secrets to further his reelection chances. Apparently the president doesn't take the sacrifice of Navy...

Budget: The GOP's vice-presidential candidate tells the president to either work to stop the mandated cuts to defense under budget sequestration, or tell us what the cuts will be and just what he'll be commander-in-chief of. From Day 1 of his administration, it was clear that President Obama had little use for the military except as a backdrop for the occasional photo-op. He saw it as an egregious example of the American exceptionalism and leadership for which he would incessantly apologize. He would let it wither, slashing our nuclear arsenal, gutting its budget, eviscerating missile defense and canceling major weapons...

Politics: The administration likes to use soldiers for photo-ops but now, in a critical battleground state, they want to restrict the extra time for service members who protect our right to vote to cast theirs. mvsaclThe administration showed its true appreciation for military service when, on July 17, the Obama for America Campaign, the Democratic National Committee and the Ohio Democratic Party filed suit in that swing state to strike down part of the state's law governing voting by members of the military that gives them extra time to cast their ballots. Ohio is one of 32 states that allows...

The Obama Record: The president's defense strategy creates a hollow force and worsens our readiness crisis. Big cuts mean weakening the military's ability to fulfill its constitutional duty to provide for the common defense. Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the president's victory lap in Afghanistan on the anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of the Navy SEALs "an attempt to shore up his national security credentials, because he has spent the past three years gutting our military." Indeed he has. "He cut the F-22, future combat...

The Obama Record: The president's shredding of the Constitution began at the Preamble's provision for the common defense. He gave away our missile defense to appease Moscow and betray our allies. Derided as Star Wars, the Strategic Defense Initiative announced by President Reagan on March 23, 1983, was to be the fulfillment of his dream of being able to deter or even defeat a nuclear missile attack, rather than avenge one, with a multilayered system of defenses aimed at enemy missiles in all stages of flight. SDI and its concept of defending America and its allies were attacked as destabilizing...

Security: A deputy defense secretary tells Congress that the administration is indeed considering giving Moscow sensitive Aegis ballistic missile defense data. We've gone from "trust but verify" to "appease and surrender." Brad Roberts testified before a House Armed Services subcommittee Tuesday that the Obama administration was actively considering giving Moscow classified missile defense data to allay Russian concerns about the capabilities and intent of our proposed ballistic missile defense system based in Europe to guard against missiles launched from Iran. Roberts testified that the administration believes "cooperation could be well-served by some limited sharing of classified information of a certain...