Recently we have veered off course and Obama is on the verge of making a mistake that will likely lead us to perpetual war and bleed us dry.
I have been watching the budget debate and military spending for some time with little interest but a NYT article posted today on MSNBC sounded an alarm for me today. Being a former military person (retired) I have no problem with adequate military spending. There are times, I can envision, when we might have to get downright nasty to defend ourselves. In the recent past we have relied of all our toys and do-dads to do our killing for us, and if it came down to something protracted like a simmering proxy war we could simply hire someone else to do it.
The military GW Bush inherited was a war machine designed to win quickly and get out or not fight at all. This high tech approach served us well in beating or deterring bully states but was ill-suited for a protracted grind such as Iraq, one but not the only reason he did so badly in the first years in Iraq. That kind of military still makes sense as a defensive mentality. There is something to be said for a war machine simply designed to kill people and break things rather than act as a police force, rebuild countries, keep enthroned puppets in office and so on. It is a military as a deterrent and ready for use when all else fails.
Here’s where the Obama administration has me scared. Secretary of Defense Gates is in a fight to change the military from a "force on force" structure to one that is more nimble and usable (Write more likely to be used). Instead of missile defense against the likes of North Korea, tanks artillery, the usual mainstay of people in funny close trying to kill other people in equally impractical and funny cloths he wants something more useful.
According to the piece,
Mr. Gates predicted more of these messy, unconventional wars, and he argued that this kind of conflict requires America to shift spending to items like mine-resistant vehicles, surveillance drones and medical-evacuation helicopters, at the expense of tanks, bombers and aircraft carriers.
Now that scares me to death. What does the Obama administration have in mind as messy, unconventional wars? Pakistan? Somalia? Some other hell-hole in Africa? This looks to be perpetual war not getting ready for the next bully or to defend ourselves.
We can have a fair argument on how big a force that should be but first there should be a more basic question asked. What kind of force and for what use. This administration is going down the wrong road.