Category Archives: defense policy

Defense Cuts on the Stump

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President Obama, speaking before the VFW the other day, had some interesting words to say about defense, and cuts to our defense capability that are looming.  Naturally, I have a few words to say about what he said.

People in Congress ought to be able to come together and agree on a plan, a balanced approach that reduces the deficit and keeps our military strong[.]

Indeed.  When are the President and his fellow Progressives in the Senate going to get out of the way of a bipartisan solution and allow one, instead of throwing our nation’s security away on his demand to raise taxes on his disfavored group of Americans?  After all, it’s Obama’s demand that taxes be raised, rather than spending be cut elsewhere—like in our bloated entitlement programs—that’s standing in the way of salvaging our defense establishment.

And there are a number of Republicans in Congress who don’t want you to know that most of them voted for these cuts. Now they’re trying to wriggle out of what they agreed to.

Nah—they’ve made no bones about this.  Obama held a gun to their heads and forced the idiocy of sequestration during the debt ceiling “negotiations” when he threatened to destroy our economy if he couldn’t get his tax increases, even to the point of cynically blowing up an agreement that had been reached—including revenue increases, if not tax rate bumps—with his last-minute (literally) demand for an additional $1 trillion increase in taxes.

Instead of making tough choices to reduce the deficit, they’d rather protect tax cuts for some of the wealthiest Americans, even if it risks big cuts in our military.

Again, indeed.  Instead of making tough choices to reduce the deficit, Obama is ready to impose destructive cuts on our military in order to get his taxes on his disfavored Americans, and I’ve got to tell you, Mr Obama, I disagree.

As we look ahead to the challenges that we face as a nation and the leadership that’s required, you don’t just have my words, you have my deeds.

President Obama’s deeds are especially frightening.  His “deeds” include the idle chit-chat that’s allowing Iran to get nuclear weapons.  His “deeds” include the idle chit-chat that’s allowing the Syrian boss Assad to butcher his own citizens—19,000 of his fellow Syrians—and to move his chemical weapons arsenal and prepare it for use against surviving Syrians dissidents.  His deeds include surrendering to Russian demands and throwing Poland and the Czech Republic into the teeth of the Bear and cancelling a plan to build missile defense installations in those two countries.  His deeds include surrendering American foreign policy to the veto authority of Russia and The People’s Republic of China, especially vis-à-vis Iran and northern Korea.

His deeds include his claimed end to a war in Iraq that was already won and done, with only a SOFA to facilitate American troop presence for training to be negotiated.  Without any American presence—Obama’s crowning achievement here—Iraq is falling apart under terrorist attacks and secular and religious strife, and al Qaeda is resurgent.

His deeds include winding down the war in Afghanistan with an announced withdrawal schedule and nothing left behind.  He’s snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, as the Taliban are still in the field and effective, while the Afghan army is neither.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman, Buck McKeon (R, CA) has the right of it:

President Obama played no small part in setting the time bomb that is sequestration.  Indeed, automatic defense cuts were included in the Budget Control Act at his insistence.  Now he owes our troops his best efforts to defuse the cuts.  Ultimatums from the campaign trail are not enough.

The challenges we face as a nation are legion, the future is near, and the leadership Obama has demonstrated and the deeds he’s done, make change imperative.

Paper Tiger

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There has been a disturbing development in the South China Sea, an area of the world toward which Our government claims it’s pivoting as central to American security.

Scarborough Shoal is a dinky little set of islands lying 140 miles west of Luzon Island, Republic of the Philippines, and 750 miles south of the People’s Republic of China.  This is a wholly unremarkable set of islands, except for the rich fishing and the equally rich oil deposits below the bottom of the region there.  And it’s entirely within the Philippine 200 mile Economic Exclusion Zone.

Because of its wealth, the PRC sent its fishing vessels and its armed patrol boats to the area in a naked attempt to occupy it.  The Philippine navy responded with two of its coast guard cutters, and the face-off lasted until a typhoon forced everyone to leave.

President Obama’s response?  Against the backdrop of a 1951 treaty that binds us to the defense of the Republic of the Philippines and that’s still, nominally, in force, Obama did nothing.  Nada.  Just meekly watched from the sidelines (if he was paying even that much attention).  He did not execute his favored tactic of getting a coterie of nations together to cry out and shake their collective finger very firmly at the Chinese.  He sent no USN destroyer to the area.  He raised no objection at all.  He left our ally to twist in the wind.

While this was going on, the PRC also sent a fishing boat into the territorial waters of the Republic of Palau, another dinky little island—population 21,000—way on the other side of the Philippines.  Palau objected, and when the Chinese vessel refused to leave, they fired on it, captured it, and forced the Chinese to pay a fine for their trespass.

As the WSJ (not quite) put it, it’s a sad day when the government of a tiny speck of an island shows more courage in standing up to an enemy than does our own President.

Hope and Change

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The last 3½ years have seen a lot of this slogan.  While the hope—for the better—waned long ago, President Obama has, in fact, achieved quite a lot in the way of change.  Here are some of those changes:

He got Obamacare rammed through, albeit in the dark of night in a wholly, cynically, partisan manner, and he did it without a single Progressive (or Republican, come to that) congressman actually reading the bill prior to voting on it—some proud in their ignorance.  This bill achieves quite a lot: it lets children extend their childhoods and parental dependencies to their 26th year, by staying on mumsy’s and popsy’s health insurance policies.  It adds to the Federal deficit with its trillion-dollar costs.  It lets you, taxpayers, pay for coverage for an additional 20+ million health insurees.  It nationalizes the health care and health insurance industries.

He got Dodd-Frank rammed through in the same manner and with the same level of Congressional ignorance.  And pride of ignorance.  This bill also achieves quite a lot.  It creates a fourth branch of government in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Financial Stability Oversight Council.  These two agencies are wholly unaccountable to the Congress—and so to us—are not under control of the President, and at least the CFPB’s budget comes, on demand, from the Federal Reserve System.  Yet these two will, single-handedly and without oversight, determine whether financial institutions will be allowed to do business (vis., extend loans or credit of any sort—even at your corner mom and pop grocery store) and the conditions under which they will be allowed to do so.

He’s achieved a trillion-dollar cut in our defense capacity at a time of rising PRC aggressiveness, a soon-to-be-nuclear-armed Iran, and an expansive, grasping Russia.  This includes a shrinking Navy, a gutted Army, and an Air Force with little capacity for anything other than looking pretty in fly-bys.

In an apparent nod to an earlier Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, he’s leaking every cyber-warfare and counter-terrorism secret we used to have to the news outlets.  Apparently, if we have no secrets, other gentlemen have no need to resist the temptation to read ours.  Or he subscribes to the theory that if we tell our enemies everything we have, we don’t need to spend our resources trying to figure out what they know about us (another savings!).  Or both.

He’s instructed his DoD to desist using unpleasant interrogation techniques.  And, since he believes our enemies have no knowledge of anything that’s of intelligence value at all, he’s instituted a program of killing them rather than capturing them and having to figure out how to hold them and question them.  And he brags about personally selecting, by name, the ones that are to be assassinated—a Roman circus thumbs down from the Emperor.

No, Obama has wrought enormous change.  Just all of it has been destructive of our great nation.

We need to fix this.

Some Thoughts on Security Leaks

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President Obama finds it offensive that anyone would accuse him of leaking classified information for personal political gain.

The notion that my White House would purposely release national security information is offensive[.]

Of course it is.  And President Nixon had some remarks along these lines, too.

Yet here is a partial list of the White House’s leaks:

  • A terrorist kill list, identifying persons whom Obama personally approves for remote control execution (and so leaves no terrorist to be inconveniently captured and questioned
  • reports of US spies infiltrating Al Qaeda in Yemen
  • stories about Osama bin Laden’s DNA and how the US got it
  • US involvement in the Stuxnet (and Flame) computer virus development and employment against Iranian nuclear facilities, including identification of the government lab that designed it
  • revealed a British asset who penetrated al Qaeda and stopped another bombing of a US-bound airliner

These leaks, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) correctly says, put “American lives in jeopardy,” put “our nation’s security in jeopardy.”  And every one of those leaks push an Obama agenda, or purport to paint Obama in a favorable light.

Oh, and the White House’s leaks about a supposed Israeli plan to use Azerbaijani bases to launch an attack against Iranian nuclear facilities—which plan, if it existed, became impossible for an Obama-disliked Israel to execute.

Yet Obama refuses to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the leaks; although Attorney General Eric Holder has named two DoJ attorneys to investigate.  While it’s true that the leaking that’s coming out of the White House is a present and clear danger and a special prosecutor investigation would take time—possibly years—such an appointment at least would move toward defusing the personal gain question.

Moreover, his CIA and his Department of Justice have announced they will not cooperate with Congressional investigations into the leaks.

I have to ask: why is Obama so bent on hindering investigations into these leaks?

Obama’s offended?  He’s not as offended as are honest Americans over them.

Walking Small

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With apologies to Sheriff Pusser; but the disrespect comes from the administration.  Why are we so timid in front of the People’s Republic of China?  Where did that timidity get us vis-à-vis the Soviet Union prior to President Reagan?

At the Shangri-La Dialogue conference, a gathering of the Asia-Pacific region’s national defense officials to discuss regional security questions, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ought to reassure the PRC that the new US military strategy focusing on Asia was not designed to contain them, saying

Some view the increased emphasis by the United States on Asia-Pacific as a challenge to China; I reject that view entirely.

Never mind that the PRC is an aggressive and growing threat to the US and to our friends and allies.

A PLA representative asked Panetta

My question is, sir, could you enlighten me a little more how the US plans to develop military-to-military relations with China?

Panetta responded with a list of American planned initiatives: plans to cooperate on cyber and space, creating teams to work on these difficult issues, exchanges between military commanders, and a visit to China later this summer by the secretary himself.  (And I thought President Obama had all the self-importance in the administration.  [/snark])  Notice that, though: the PRC asks what are we going to do to please them; they have no plans at all to approach us.

As Senator John McCain (R, AZ) noted after the conference,

Realities are we are retiring ships.  We are having the smallest navy since World War II.

There is great reluctance on the part of this administration to confront China’s aggressiveness toward us and our friends and allies, and shrinking capability being left to subsequent administrations who might have a greater interest in the region’s security.

Yet this timidity is part and parcel with our government’s performance in another part of the world.  While thousands of Syrians die at the hands of the Assad regime, our government sits around clucking its collective tongue and shaking its finger very firmly at Assad—and does nothing of substance.

Senator Joe Lieberman (I, CT) notes that while he thinks the administration is making progress toward a halt in the bloodshed in Syria, it “is moving too slowly.”

Lieberman went on, saying that Panetta had assured him that DoD has a series of plans that they can implement, yet:

I don’t think anybody expects that [Panetta’s claimed plans] would include American troops on the ground in Syria nor will they require the US to take on the fight against Assad alone.

So even those little vaunted and lightly touted “plans” involve nothing more substantive than continued Obamatalk—idle chit-chat and finger waving, with no intension of doing anything serious.

Then Lieberman summed up this administration’s behavior:

If we to continue to say that we won’t do anything to help the Syrian people unless there is UN Security Council authorization, that is essentially saying to the Russians, ‘you can block the world from coming to the aid of these people in Syria against your ally Assad,’ and that is exactly the wrong thing to do.

Senator McCain got right to the point:

I can’t think of a time in the many years that I have served this country in many ways that I have been more embarrassed about my country and their failure to carry out our fundamental principles.  It is shameful because the countries in the region say that they need American leadership, not American unilateral action….  It is patently obvious that this president does not believe that America leads.

And Iran.  After three years of Obamatalk, Iran now is just months away from obtaining nuclear weapons.  Even today, the administration is just sitting around talking with the Iranian “negotiators.”

We’re not even carrying Teddy Roosevelt’s big stick—nor are we prepared to use one, should one magically appear, like that McNairy County sheriff was.