By Daniel Greenfield ——Bio and Archives--January 6, 2012
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Rep. Allen West says the military cuts outlined by President Barack Obama at the Pentagon Thursday show “incompetence” in understanding the nation’s national security needs and the defense strategy is not “coherent.”
“We’re not talking about a coherent national security strategy — what the president laid out is very dangerous and it really does show incompetence in understanding national security strategy,” West said. “He did not talk about how we go forward on the 21st century battlefield — the ability to engage, deter, and strike the enemy when necessary. We cannot sit around and say we won’t fight a second combat operation because the enemy has a vote in this.
after World War II we gutted the military to such a degraded state that the first Army battalion that showed up on the battlefield in Korea was absolutely decimated — I don’t want to see that type of things happen to my friends and also one of my relatives that’s still serving in the military.”But it's not like we have to worry about North Korea anymore. In other good news the strategy makes it all but impossible for us to counter it in a new conflict. To understand what's really at stake here read Major General Scales' piece in the Washington Post.
Unfortunately, Obama’s plan does exactly that. It forgets the lessons of history. Some facts: Harry Truman seeking to never repeat the costs of World War II reduced the Army from 8 million soldiers to fewer than half a million. Without the intervention of Congress, he would have eliminated the Marine Corps entirely. The result was the evisceration of both land services in Korea, a war Truman never intended to fight.
With Dwight Eisenhower came the “New Look” strategy that sought to reduce the Army and Marine Corps again to allow the creation of a nuclear delivery force built around the Strategic Air Command. Along came Vietnam, a war that Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson never wanted to fight. But by 1970 our professional Army broke apart and was replaced by a body of amateurs. The result was defeat and 58,000 dead.
After Vietnam, the Nixon administration broke the Army again. I know. I was there to see the drug addiction, murders in the barracks and chronic indiscipline, caused mainly by a dispirited noncommissioned corps that voted with its feet and left. Then came Jimmy Carter’s unique form of neglect that led to the “hollow Army” of the late ’70s, an Army that failed so miserably in its attempt to rescue the American hostages in Iran.I've excerpted only a portion but the entire thing is well worth reading to understand the situation. This isn't about saving money, this is about retaining a military that's still large enough to cost a lot of money, but can't win wars on the battlefield. As far as the leaner meaner force is concerned. Obama's plan delays the Joint Strike Fighter again. 120 planes are being postponed. So lean yes, mean no. 15 billion dollars is being saved by retarding the program which will make the planes more expensive, which will make them harder to sell to our allies, which will set back American military capabilities further. 15 billion dollars sounds like a lot, but it's about what this administration spends on ice cream. Hey you know who could use that 15 billion dollars that we aren't spending upgrading our air force?
ACORN and other radical left-wing groups would be eligible for up to $15 billion in federal funding if President Obama’s new economic stimulus package becomes law.All this is about what you would expect from Reverend Wright and Billy Ayers' boy. Trevor Loudon at New Zeal has his own thoughts on the subject.
In issuing his ruling, Davis said, “Counting the signature of Bugs Bunny is something only a lawyer could make seem OK.”
Owners of the Armi Jager AP80 .22-calibre rifle received a letter from the RCMP in December saying the registration certificates for the firearm would be revoked and they had a month to dispose of their weapons - with no compensation. As of Dec. 20, the once legally owned gun would be classified as prohibited. According to the letter, the decision was made because the AP80 is cosmetically similar to the AK-47 rifle.In New York, home of gun control related insanity, where two visitors who brought legal firearms with them and asked to check them are facing hefty jail sentences, water guns can't remotely resemble actual guns. The above case is taking place in Canada and a 22 rifle is about as dangerous as a water gun, no matter what it looks like. A robber who walks into a bank with a 22 rifle will be laughed at. But this is what happens when bureaucrats make the rules. And when gun registries are used to seize weapons.
Stratfor (Strategic Forecasting, Inc.) has achieved a middling reputation among people who don't know any better as the go-to organization for intelligence and analysis on just about anything. There's rarely a topic in the news that the organization doesn't sound off on, either through its own website or in the form of published "reports." (Stratfor also used to be quoted quite a bit by legacy news organizations, though that seems to have died down in recent years.)So says J.R. Dunn at American Thinker. Copies are still available of George Friedman's 1991 book, "The Coming War with Japan."
From Library Journal Friedman and Lebard remind us at the beginning of their book that this century has already produced unlikely turns of events. Who in 1960 could have predicted that America 20 years later would be in retreat, defeated by the Vietnamese and reeling before the Iranians? If war with Japan seems impossible, the authors nevertheless deliver on their book's title with an alarming and usually plausible scenario that takes Japan and the United States on a downward spiral from trade friction to protectionism to armed showdown over markets and raw materials. Friedman and Lebard do not shrink from categorical assertions in the future tense--words like "inevitably" and "inexorably" dot the landscapeMaybe there should have been a few less inevitablys in the mix considering that around this time the United States found itself drawn into growing conflicts in the Middle East.
If the worst-case scenario is the basis for planning, then Israel must reduce its risk and restructure its geography along the more favorable lines that existed between 1949 and 1967, when Israel was unambiguously victorious in its wars, rather than the borders and policies after 1967, when Israel has been less successful. The idea that the largest possible territory provides the greatest possible security is not supportable in military history. As Frederick the Great once said, he who defends everything defends nothing.”The latter might make more sense if we were talking about the Sinai. How any strategic expert could argue that the 1948 borders are more defensible than the 1967 borders is beyond me considering that we are talking about a relatively small amount of territory that is potently strategic. Does George Friedman really think that splitting Israel's capital in half and handing over the other half to the enemy will make the country easier to defend? An inevitable war with Japan seems downright sensible compared to that. The idea that Israel was winning wars because of the 1948 borders, but losing them because of the 1967 borders is plain bizarre. Israel only fought one conventional war on its territory since then and it won that war despite some strategic blunders at the outset. The determining factor in the Yom Kippur War was not the size of its borders, but the lack of preparation and the failure to launch a preemptive strike. If Israel had started out with 1948 borders in the Yom Kippur War it would probably never have survived. It barely survived its War of Independence. It won the Six Day War by pushing outward. Preparing for a worst case scenario by retreating back to indefensible borders is like preparing to be attacked by tying your hands behind your back and downing a handful of sleeping pills.
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Daniel Greenfield is a New York City writer and columnist. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and his articles appears at its Front Page Magazine site.