Veteran national security reporter Bill Gertz offers a piece in the Washington Free Beacon on the military reductions proposed by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel (seen in the above DoD photo).
President Barack Obama will sharply cut ships, aircraft, and troops as part of a major reduction of U.S. military forces that will face even steeper downsizing in 2016, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced on Monday.
The defense cuts, to be announced formally in the president’s budget proposal next month, would reduce U.S. ground forces to their lowest level since World War II at a time when world threats are increasing.
...American Enterprise Institute scholar Mackenzie Eaglen said the latest defense cuts will continue to weaken the U.S. military and its technological edge.
“President Obama is submitting another defense budget that essentially seeks to cash in a peace dividend in a world with little peace,” she said. “His own director of national intelligence recently told Congress that in over a half century, he has not experienced a time when the U.S. has ‘been beset by more crises and threats around the globe.’”
You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:
http://freebeacon.com/end-of-american-military-dominance/
These build-ups and draw-downs go in cycles. Let us hope this draw-down cycle does not make us so vulnerable that any build-up will be impossible. Then, I suppose, we will all learn to speak Arabic. (Speaking Arabic in America reminds me of a futuristic novel that I think was entitled Prayers for the Assassin by Ferrigno. Very scary scenario in which part of North America becomes an Arab country.)
ReplyDeleteR.T.,
ReplyDeleteYes, these military build-ups and draw-downs go in cycles, but bad things happen in the world when the U.S. draws down, as we are thought to be weak by our adversaries, as well as our so-called friends.
In my view, this is not the time to draw down.
I hope we can survive two more years of the Obama administration and that the next administration is a stronger and smarter one.