In early January, President Barack Obama traveled across the Potomac River to the Pentagon and joined Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to discuss his Administration’s military strategy, promising that he would keep America’s fighting forces the best-trained, best-led, best-equipped military in history. Unfortunately, he’s not keeping that promise, and meanwhile, China’s military is growing by leaps and bounds.
China announced this week that its new defense budget would total approximately $106 billion — an 11.2 percent increase over its previous budget. That’s on top of last year’s 12.7 percent increase, making China’s defense spending larger than that of all other Asian nations combined. Heritage’s Dean Cheng writes that those figures are “a sobering statistic when one considers that this includes the world’s third-largest economy (Japan) and North and South Korea, which remain locked in a Cold War-era standoff.”
While China’s military is growing, America’s is shrinking. Under President Obama’s budget, the U.S. military will shrink dramatically, and the President makes defense the lowest budget priority among the major categories of spending in the federal budget. All told, the President would slash military spending by $487 billion over 10 years — and that’s on top of the $500 billion in cuts ushered in by the sequestration process under the Budget Control Act. The effect of all those cuts? A military that is woefully unprepared to execute its constitutional duty to protect America. As Heritage’s Baker Spring described it, “The combination of the budget request and the Budget Control Act of 2011 would reduce the military’s personnel levels and force structure to the point that they could no longer protect U.S. vital interests and keep U.S. security commitments around the world.”
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