Dear Friends,
In April 2011,
the President ordered a sweeping “strategic review” of the nation’s
military. On Thursday, that report was released by the Pentagon. I spent
yesterday reading through it. Here is my reaction to the President’s
more “lean” and more “agile” military:
We’ve heard this song before
and it hasn’t worked out that way. A “lean” and more “agile” military
has meant a hollowed out force that wasn’t ready for unforeseen
conflicts. To be plain about it, the White House and the Department of
Defense have managed to repeat decades worth of mistakes in only eight
pages.
Can we save money? Absolutely. Do we need to prioritize investments? You bet. But that's not what is going on here. They envision a slimmed down
Army and Marine Corps (among other things) that will shift its focus
toward Asia at the expense of everything else. The President expects to
focus more exclusively on Special Forces, cybersecurity, and
intelligence.
I don’t believe those things can ever be mutually exclusive.
After World War II, and again
after Vietnam, the United States made the assumption that the wars were
over and we didn’t need such a powerful military anymore. But before
long, we inevitably found ourselves in the next unforeseen conflict and
had to spend the first years of that war rebuilding our capability to
fight. We found that we had hollowed out our force and we weren’t ready
for our enemies. Those mistakes cost the lives of far too many.
As the Chairman of the House
Armed Services Committee, Buck McKeon, put it yesterday, the President’s
strategic review is, “a lead from behind strategy for a left behind
America.” I’ve gotten to know Buck pretty well over the last year and I
can tell you, he calls it like he sees it.
To paraphrase his response
yesterday: in America, we don’t figure out how much money we’d like to
spend on the nation’s defense and then develop a strategy to fit that
budget. In this country, we look at what the threats are from our
enemies, what our commitments are to our allies, and then we allocate
the resources necessary to get that job done.
To give you a good example of
what I'm talking about, consider this: the President’s review is a
dramatic departure from our long-standing strategy of being able to
respond to two simultaneous threats. In other words, if we find
ourselves engaged with an enemy in one region of the world, we won’t
ever leave ourselves vulnerable to an aggressor in another.
So let’s say, for instance, we
do allocate resources to counter a rising threat from China over the
medium and long term. What precisely are our capabilities going to be
elsewhere? If Israel is attacked or Iran decides to shut down the
Straits of Hormuz, are we able to respond? Or better yet, were we able
to prevent it in the first place by having a strong deterrent?
If your only answer to that
question is “we hope it won’t happen”, then you don’t have a strategy,
you have a hollowed out force. And I’m not sure about you, but I don’t
ever want a hollowed out force. I don't ever want to have to depend on
the French to come to my rescue.
Would it be nice to live in a
world where you could trust somebody else to provide for your security?
Sure. Is it a burden that America has been and remains the world’s great
superpower? Of course it is. And do the Europeans need to pull their
own weight? Without a doubt.
But at the end of the day, if
you don't want to allocate the resources, what is your alternative? To
trust China? Rely on Europe? Hope for the best?
That’s not a strategy. And it’s not an America or a world I would ever want to see us living in.
In any case, that is my
reaction. The report can be found at the link below. Take a look if you
have a minute and let me know how you see it.
Sincerely,
Rich Nugent
Member of Congress
No comments:
Post a Comment