National defense is a forgotten issue this election, despite that abundant empirical evidence that we need a larger and stronger military. Man for man our troops have proven themselves vastly superior to any conceivable enemy, but there aren’t enough of them, and they need all the help available from expensive technology.
Nonetheless, as the WSJ Political Diary (still only $7.95/month cheap) points out, the dominant wing of the Democratic Party still has the anti-military spirit of the McGovern campaign:
There’s at least one government program Democrats are planning to cut deeply next year. Rep. Barney Frank last week told the editorial board of his home district’s South Coast Standard-Times that defense spending will be slashed by 25% in the next Congress. He said such dramatic cuts would likely force the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and a rollback in Pentagon plans for high-tech weaponry. “We don’t need all these fancy new weapons,” the Massachusetts liberal told the paper’s editors.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has made similar comments on the campaign trail. In a video circulating on the Web, he says he intends to cut “tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending” at the Pentagon. “I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our investments in future combat systems.” He also would institute a new oversight panel to monitor the DoD’s existing planning panel to make sure “it is not used to justify unnecessary spending.”
On his campaign Web site, Mr. Obama says he also wants to increase the size of Army by 65,000 and the Marine Corps by 27,000, while expanding health care, special ops, civil affairs and other specialties and introducing a “Military Families Advisory Board.” The Pentagon has worked in recent years to reduce overhead and increase what it calls “the tooth to tail ratio.” Mr. Obama’s clear agenda is to invest in more military tail, less tooth.
The pledge to add more men and expand special operations forces is Slick Barry’s way of separating himself from the Barney Franks, but it’s an illusion. Larger forces, if they are to be effective, require more money not just for pay but also for weapons, operations and “future combat systems”. And re-labeling undersupported units as “special operations forces” won’t make them elite. Will an Obama Administration secure adequate funding in the face of a Democratic Congress’s opposition and its own gargantuan domestic spending plans? Or will it do what the Obama Web site suggests: Divert money to an Armed Forces version of social spending while trimming combat readiness, thus re-creating the “hollow army” of the pre-Reagan era?
I think we all know the way to bet.
Further reading: Bret Stephens, “Will Obama Gut Defense?”Michael Fumento, “The Democrats’ Special Forces Fetish”
Comments