March 28, 2012
What Happened to Preserve, Protect, and Defend?
By John GriffingHow does a president of the United States whose allegiance is to his country knowingly and in plain sight sabotage his nation's defenses? Until recently, the discussions of severe military cuts remained in the appropriate realm of working groups, and few seriously considered Obama's radical campaign promises to eliminate nuclear weapons from the U.S. arsenal to be of any real validity. After all, many Democrat presidential contenders before Obama had pandered to pacifists and the armies of the naïve swelling the Democratic base in order to get elected. But none of these individuals actually took proactive steps to completely remove America's nuclear triad from the list of strategic options. Our ability to instill fear in the hearts of our enemies, both current and future, was left unquestioned by all previous presidents, minor reductions in stockpiles notwithstanding.
Obama has done what no guardian of America would do: systematically tear down the most vital of America's defenses, all while America's enemies wait with bated breath for the nation that owes trillions in debt to be left standing defenseless. What happens when America lays down its arms? It seems Obama would like to find out. Americans may be the unintended (intended?) victims of a perverse social experiment.
Leaks from high-level defense sources reveal that in addition to commitments under the New START agreement, which brings the total number of deliverable U.S. warheads to 1,000 -- an unacceptably low number that prevents the U.S. from being able to destroy the 3,000 priority strategic targets identified by the DoD -- Obama now plans to implement an 80-percent force reduction that will leave America with only 300 deliverable warheads. Such a move is suicidal. Such a low number is wholly insufficient to protect America from the growing list of dangerous and erratic nuclear regimes with global ambitions. Even more crucial to understanding the risk inherent in such a decision is the role of U.S. nuclear weapons stockpiles as a deterrent.
Americans have only been able to live the cushy, carefree existence of the last half-century -- now taken for granted by new generations of youngsters who have known only prosperity and for whom Cold War politics are moot -- because the U.S. possessed a credible nuclear arsenal capable of devastating any adversary. It is because of, not in spite of, America's nuclear assets that America has survived multiple existential threats.
The danger of nuclear confrontation has increased, not decreased, since the end of the Cold War. The likelihood of nuclear exchange has increased rapidly, mirroring the acquisition of nuclear weapons by small and medium-sized states, with multiple hostile nuclear powers now vying for global influence. Obama is at best gravely naïve if he is pursuing drastic and suicidal cuts to our arsenal at the present time.
Obama has been busy gutting American conventional forces as well.
The Army and the Marines are to be significantly downsized, even as their global commitments expand. Consequently, America can no longer simultaneously fight two major wars in two theaters of deployment, a capability deemed vital by defense insiders to ensuring America's defense against coalitions of aggressor states, and now a plausible scenario owing to the Russian military buildup in the Middle East and the increasinglybelligerent actions of China on every front. Both nations are in a Warsaw-Pact prototype alliance called the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that openly challenges U.S. leadership and engages in maneuvers in which the United States is the target. Iran is also a member of this organization. Eliminating the two-war capability would seem ill-advised. But then, Obama probably knows this.
The Navy thinly escaped Obama's hacksaw. Recent studies commissioned by DoD indicate that the present number of aircraft carrier battle groups is not sufficient to maintain an adequate defensive posture in the Pacific, where U.S.-Taiwanese forces are under constant threat of nuclear exchange with China. Even though the number of carrier groups is already below normal, Obama had wanted to cut another carrier battle group from the fleet. The Navy torpedoed the move, but not without cost. Modernization efforts have been canned, and shipbuilding will be greatly slowed, which will cause the fleet to shrink by approximately 70 ships in the 2020s.
Enter and exit the U.S. Air Force. The Air Force has been forced to lose several hundred planes, even though its present number is already below the threshold admittedly needed to carry out tactical bombing campaigns. In Bosnia, when the Air Force was a few times larger than today, it took 40 percent of active aircraft to execute the campaign. Can anyone seriously argue that the U.S. Air Force, which needed nearly half of its resources to prosecute Bosnia, can actually manage a conflict involving multiple major powers at one time, especially if cuts of the magnitude enacted go unchallenged?
America's president has done more to harm American security than our greatest foes could ever dream of doing, and he has done it with both eyes wide open, willingly, with full knowledge of the implications, which raises the obvious question: what word describes a president who will do this to his own country? The recent Medvedev revelations are a good indicator of Obama's interest in satisfying Russian demands in ways that would be unpopular with the American people.
Obama admittedly seeks the eradication of American superpower status. Even if a case can be made for a reduced U.S. footprint worldwide or for a less interventionist foreign policy, would a loyal American knowingly seek to undermine his or her nation's greatness merely to satisfy some philosophical pretense to equality with "everybody else"?
The time for pretense is over. Obama is no friend of America.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/03/what_happened_to_preserve_protect_and_defend.html#ixzz1qcRycdaN