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Defense budget cut again

Congress and the President appeared to have reached an agreement  on the 2016 defense budget. According to our preliminary calculations, the fiscal year 2016 budget is at a near-historic low, representing about 14 percent of total federal discretionary and nondiscretionary outlays. The 2016 defense budget is $177 billion lower than its 2010 counterpart.

According to a report just filed by Defense News , the 2016 defense bill has been slashed  by $5 billion to comply with the budget deal between Congress and the president, including $2.6 billion in “adjustments” to acquisition programs. The total package now comes in at $607 billion, down from the original $612 billion for the 2016 fiscal year.

Breaking Defense outlined the cuts, which run the gamut from mundane items such as fuel purchases to yet another blow to America’s shrunken navy, and cost-cutting on strategic weapons programs as well as on force readiness.  Research into new weapons appears also to have taken a hit.

The cuts come at a time when spending by Russia and China has increased dramatically, and increased threats are presented by Iran, North Korea, and terrorist organizations. Russia has, for the first time, a lead over the U.S. in strategic nuclear weapons, and a ten to one advantage in tactical nuclear weapons.  China already has more submarines than the U.S. Navy, and will have a larger force overall within five years. Beijing also has sophisticated anti-ship missiles that America does not, and which the American fleet has no defense against.

The cuts continue the dramatic shrinking of America’s armed forces, which are barely at a shadow of the strength possessed as recently as 1990. The Navy is the smallest it has been since before World War 1, the army, which by the end of the year will be smaller than North Korea’s, is the smallest it has been since before World War 2, and the Air Force is the smallest it has ever been.  In the past, the drastic cuts were attributed to the downfall of the USSR, but under Putin, Russia has returned to cold war strength.  China has become a major superpower. North Korea possess nuclear weapons and will soon mount them on missiles that can reach the U.S.  Terrorist groups control more territory, money and influence than ever. Russia, China, and terrorist organizations have become active in Latin America.

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A total of $690 million in cuts to the Air Force long range bomber program is illustrative of how U.S. forces are being challenged by antiquated equipment. Currently, the Air Force only has 20 truly modern bombers.   It should be remembered that the B-52’s are so old, the grandfathers of some of today’s pilots flew the very same aircraft—not the same model, the very same plane- their grandchildren now occupy. The B-1 program of the 1970’s was cancelled before many were built, and the Reagan-era  B-2 purchase was slashed from over 100 to the current 20.

A unique feature of the 2016 defense appropriations was the threatened veto by President Obama over the Guantanamo Bay issue.  The White House has threatened to veto the defense appropriations bill if Congress didn’t submit to his plans to close the on-site prison that houses terrorists, some of whom have been released and now again engage in terrorist activities. This marks the very first time that any President has used his veto power over a defense bill on an issue that has nothing to do with defense spending. It is an indication of the lack of importance the current White House attaches to national security.

The Navy has received the fewest cuts.  While there has been very little coverage in the media about the shrinking American armed forces, China’s aggressive maritime policy and the spectacular growth of its navy, which will be larger than America’s within five years (and currently has more submarines) and its advanced weaponry (including the DF-21 missile, with technology the U.S. hasn’t yet attained) has made the public conscious of the growing threat.  However, the American Navy remains at a dangerously low level, down from 600 ships in 1990 to the current 254, and there is nothing in the new budget that demonstrates any determination to return to a safe level.

 

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A Vision for National Defense


By Congressman Randy Forbes

It was March, 1968. That month alone, 156 U.S. planes fell from the skies of Southeast Asia.  Over 250 American airmen and even more soldiers lost their lives.  That year, men like newlywed James Crew of Windber, Pennsylvania, an honors graduate of the Air Force Academy; and Major William Cordero of Santa Barbara, California, who had just found out he was going to have an infant son, would lose their lives.

In those days, U.S. aircraft relied on sheer numbers of bombs dropped because each bomb was “dumb” – it couldn’t precisely target something on the ground. To drop such huge numbers of munitions, the U.S. military had to fly innumerable missions over heavily defended enemy territory, incurring many more casualties.

Vietnam showed the consequences of an America unable to control the skies and achieve air dominance. By the conclusion of the war, over 3,200 U.S. aircraft were downed.  Over 58,000 Americans lost their lives in that conflict.

Fast-forward 20 years.

In the hot summer of 1990, the Iraqi Army – then the world’s fourth largest army – launched an invasion of Kuwait with a bombing campaign of its capital city.  Within twelve hours, most Kuwaiti resistance ceased, and Iraq held control of the strategically valuable nation.  Alarmed, surrounding Arab powers called on the United Nations, the United States, and other Western nations to intervene. Months of sanctions and negotiations ensued, yet ultimately Iraq defied the demands of the world.

On January 17, 1991 the Persian Gulf War began with a massive U.S.-led air offensive known as Operation Desert Storm.  The risks were high and Americans knew it.  35,000 body bags had been ordered.

Yet, after only 42 days of relentless attacks by the allied coalition in the air and on the ground, Iraqi forces turned back. Only 23 aircraft fell. 147 Americans lost their lives. And 34,853 body bags would never be used.

What happened in those two decades between Vietnam and the Gulf that led to such drastically different outcomes? The answer gives us some clarity for today.

Decide to alter your amazing deeprootsmag.org cheap cialis globe relating to the exact better. As FGIDs can affect any section of the GI tract, the commander levitra look at these guys Rome classification system and the most recent, and most popular of drugs that help reduce cholesterol production is a group of drugs known as statins. Precautions viagra pills cheap A woman and a normal functioning man must stay away from this medicine. It purchase viagra is the long-term complication of the latter one. In those two decades, we developed a stealth airplane. We built precision-guided munitions that revolutionized warfare. We generated a new level of military jointness where, for the first time in history, we could bring all the services together to act as one unified force. We made considerable progress in our defense capabilities and were able to establish air dominance.

These ideas weren’t without opposition. They were challenged, lamented, and discredited by loud voices at the Pentagon and elsewhere. Too much money, many scoffed. We don’t have the resources, nor do we know if we’ll need them, others argued. Still others fought, relentlessly, but Congress insisted on the reforms and innovations we needed. One of the major differences between establishing air dominance, and failing: 34,853 empty body bags.

Today, we face serious vacuums in our national defense: a lack of strategy, repeated budget cuts, sequestration, and miscalculated defense decisions. The National Defense Panel has warned that unless we change course from the failures of recent years, our military is at a high risk of not being able to fully guarantee our national security. The effects would be felt in sectors that touch Americans on a daily basis. Communication systems. Financial transactions. Energy supply, to name a few.

When we consider this reality in the context of other turbulence in the world today, one can imagine the scenario in which we might find ourselves in the future – whether a Gulf-level of preparedness or a Vietnam-level of preparedness.

We simply cannot afford the latter. Congress has an opportunity, an obligation, to reverse our current course.

It starts by reframing our approach. First, the question we must ask is not, “How much do we want to spend on national defense?” The question we must ask is, “What do we want to accomplish with our defense?” From there, our defense strategy should drive our defense budget.

Second, we need to look beyond the Pentagon for answers.  In the 1950s in the face of a strained budget and the threat of Soviet aggression, President Eisenhower made a bold move.  He launched a senior-level planning exercise named Project Solarium to devise a new strategy to deter the Soviets while sustaining America’s economic strength. The innovative project, which consisted of multiple teams competing against each other to develop the best strategy, succeeded. President Eisenhower called it the “New Look.” Over the next decade the strategy succeeded in keeping the Soviets at bay while keeping the growth of the defense budget in check.

We can achieve something similar again, with today’s threats and with today’s unique challenges in mind. Constitutionally, Congress is tasked with providing for the common defense. Elected representatives have an obligation to push and pursue new defense technologies and innovations to ensure military power today, the same way that we pursued stealth and munitions to ensure victory in the Gulf. Elected representatives also have an opportunity to look beyond traditional approaches and devise new strategies, like President Eisenhower did. We need the creative genius that comes with collaboration between private and public sectors and allied nations to create a future-focused defense structure. Congress has the power to create that framework. That said, Congress is not, and should not try to be, the Department of Defense. Instead, it should be a Department of Ideas – generating new ideas and strategies that will not only protect us in the future, but also protect the men and women risking their lives every day to defend our freedom.

My fight for a strong national defense is relentless. I won’t give up. Because a strong defense means a strong America.

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Honor our veterans and support our troops

Today is Veterans Day.  It’s an appropriate time to remember that for at least the past one hundred years, the greatest force for good on this planet has been the United States military. The men and women of our armed forces have rescued more people from tyranny, liberated more captive nations, freed more women from oppression, and provided more assistance to victims of natural disaster than any other entity that has ever existed throughout humanity’s long history.  It is our veterans, not our politicians or pundits that offered up their lives for the cause of American freedom and safety.

The peace at any price crowd, the self-important academics, the pandering elected officials who try to buy votes by transferring funds out of military budgets and veterans programs and into give-away programs that are little more than thinly disguised bribes  for support in the next election should also remember that these heroes are human.  The dangerous and frankly idiotic cuts to our defense spending over the past several years have meant that our active, reserve, and national guard Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines must serve repeated tours facing danger and being away from their families.  These cuts have been so significant that by next year America may have a smaller army than North Korea.

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U.S. Headed towards military disaster

The announced dismissal of 550 U.S. Army majors is the latest move in what can only be seen as a concerted effort on the part of the White House to diminish America’s armed forces as much and as rapidly as the public will tolerate and the press will willingly overlook.

During its tenure, the Obama Administration has taken steps, which seen in their totality, are breathtaking in their scope and in the extraordinary danger they pose. Among  these actions are slashing the defense budget, preventing the development of  an adequate anti-missile shield, proposing unilateral reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, withdrawing all US tanks from Europe, cutting benefits to active duty service members, alienating  regional allies such as Israel, betraying key nuclear defense secrets of the United Kingdom to Moscow, prematurely withdrawing U.S. forces from key hotspots, not appropriately responding to Chinese aggression towards allies Japan and the Philippines, ignoring Russian, Chinese, and Iranian military growth in Latin America, softening sanctions against Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, and taking no viable steps in response to North Korea’s imminent deployment of nuclear ICBMs.

These actions occur in the face of a US military that was already sharply reduced from its strength in the recent past.  The navy has shrunk from 600 ships to 284, the Army is down from 17 divisions to ten, the Air Force from 37 fighter commands to 20.

This diminished force must contend with a Russia that has returned to cold war strength, possesses a 10 to 1 advantage in tactical nuclear weapons, has invaded two neighboring nations in the past ten years, has returned to cold war bases around the world, assisted in the shooting down of a civilian airliner, and has allied itself with China.

China has engaged in unprecedented espionage against civilian, governmental and military targets in the U.S., and has increased its nuclear and conventional military strength at a pace faster than either the Soviet Union or the United States did at the height of the cold war. It is a full-fledged military superpower on land, sea, air, and space, with technology every bit as capable as Washington’s.  It unabashedly asserts hegemony over a vast swath of seas that it has no legitimate right to, and has brazenly stolen resources from the Philippines. It makes no secret that it views the United States as an adversary, and its extraordinarily powerful armed forces are precisely structured to fight what is left of the American military.

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In the past, this calamitous environment would be headline news. But a virtual cloak of silence has descended upon the entire topic of military affairs, and Americans are asked to believe, contrary to all evidence, that a major war is not a possibility. Mr. Obama places his faith in using drones to target a few terrorist leaders, in the stunningly nonsensical belief that eliminating a few of them was the answer to all national security woes.  Demonstrably, that hasn’t even worked with Islamic extremists, who have gained in strength and have conquered more territory than ever before under his administration.

In what can only be seen as a direct insult to the intelligence of the American public, the White House continues to maintain that the Obama/Clinton “reset” with Russia was a success, and that the world is now “more tranquil” than ever.

There is a cynical political equation behind all this.  Progressive politicians have calculated that their re-election depends on providing ever greater giveaways to their core constituency. Despite the fact that, as noted by the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities, military spending accounts for only 19% of the federal budget  it is seen as a convenient cash cow to milk for those programs.

The Obama Administration has, to paraphrase the Beatles’ John Lennon, “given peace a chance.” The result has been disastrous. The United States is on the threshold of a devastating military disaster, either through actual force of arms by our adversaries or by a threat that America will, if current trends continue, simply be unable to counter.

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Starving the military

The prolonged lack of adequate financial support for the American military is not the type of error that can simply be undone within a few years.  It has produced a long-term threat that has already left the United States vulnerable, a condition which is increasingly significant each year it remains unaddressed.

According to a CSIS study,  “The post 9/11 U.S. defense drawdown will be significantly deeper than is generally recognized.  Because of the dual effect, or ‘double whammy,’ of the topline drawdown and the decreasing purchasing power of defense dollars, the military that the Department of Defense (DoD) can afford in 2021 will be smaller across the board, with sharp reductions in capacity across the board.”

At the same time that America and its western allies sharply erode their defense capabilities, the threat level continues to rise dramatically as Russia, Iran, North Korea, and especially China significantly expand their conventional, nuclear, and high-tech military strength.  New threats also arise from both nation-state actors such as Venezuela and quasi-national forces such as the Islamic extremist regime in parts of Iraq that arose following America’s premature withdrawal, the looming return of the Taliban following the announced U.S. departure, as well as al-Qaeda’s continuing strengthening.

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“With the closing of factories across the United States and the mass exodus of U.S. manufacturing jobs to China and other nations over the past 30 years, the United States’ critically important defense industrial base has deteriorated dramatically.  As a result, the United States now relies heavily on imports to keep our armed forces equipped and ready…Consequently, the health of the United States defense industrial base—and our national security—is in jeopardy.  We are vulnerable to major disruptions in foreign supplies that could make it impossible for U.S. warriors, warships, tanks, aircraft, and missiles to operate effectively…”

There is no time to waste. The consequences of a continued lack of appropriate support for defense needs will be unavoidable and overwhelming in the immediate future.