What the word I'm looking for? "Inadvisable"? No. "Imprudent"? No. Ah, yes, here we are: "insane":
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel today outlined a five-year Pentagon budget that would shrink Army forces to fewer than before the attacks of September 11th, 2001, while retiring older weapons, including the U-2 spy plane and the A-10 attack aircraft.Let's take these one at a time.
"Our recommendations favor a smaller and more capable force — putting a premium on rapidly deployable, self-sustaining platforms that can defeat more technologically advanced adversaries," Hagel said in prepared remarks as he proposed a budget for fiscal year 2015 of $496 billion, in line with congressionally approved limits. [emphases added]
An Army smaller than before the attacks of September 11th, 2001 in an era where, just in the context of the ex-War on Terror, al Qaeda is alive and well, in control of Libya, the Sinai, Somalia, parts of Syria and Iraq, and soon to be once again, Afghanistan, as independently re-confirmed just last week. And they're turning their sights once more on Europe and the U.S. Which means we've now come full circle, and that, in turn, means thousands more American civilians are going to die in the very near future.
But the global context goes way past al Qaeda to the Iranian mullahgarchy and Putin's Russia in the Middle East, and North Korea and the ChiComms in the Western Pacific. The gutting of American military power in these theaters will spark not one, but two regional nuclear arms races, as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates, and Australia, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, respectively, are left to fend for themselves against respective regional (and nuclear) hegemons Iran and Red China - with the Russians lurking in the background of both. This is the last and worst time imaginable to be hacking U.S. ground forces smaller not just then prior to 9/11, but to their lowest level since 1940.
This brings us to the second emphasis in the quote above. It is a standard rule of thumb in force structuring that military planners must choose one of two philosophies: what might be dubbed "quality or quantity". They either build huge numbers of basic, not overly expensive hardware - tanks, warships, planes, munitions, etc. - or they construct smaller numbers of high-tech hardware that can deliver much greater "bang for the buck". During the Cold War, the old Soviet Union employed the former strategy, while the United States opted for the latter. And although other factors certainly played a role, history records how that ultimately turned out.
Now look at Chuck Hagel's remarks again. He's not just catastrophically downsizing U.S. numbers, but is also conceding the technological edge that is the only factor that has kept us a military superpower. It's almost as if the Obama Regime is inviting an all-out attack on our country.
Take a look at the American aircraft - and spacecraft - depicted in the following video.....
....because you'll never see them - well, you'll never see them anyway, as they were canceled several years ago, but this just re-confirms it. While our enemies have no such misguided priorities.
Congressional Republicans were having none of it:
The proposal for a smaller Army met immediate resistance today.
"It's going to be Congress' job to step in and move those numbers up," Republican Representative Michael Turner of Ohio, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said on Bloomberg TV's "In the Loop" program. "The world is not getting to be a safer place. This is not the time for us to begin to retreat, and certainly not the time to cut our military."
Texas Representative Michael McCaul, Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the cuts would hurt military readiness. The nation is only in this position because the Obama administration and Congress will not seriously take on cuts to entitlements, he said.
"It's all being sacrificed ... on the altar of entitlements. This president cannot take on mandatory spending, so all we've done in the Congress — and this president — is basically cut discretionary spending," McCaul said.
Retired General Jack Keane told Fox News the proposed budget cuts by the Pentagon would "cut into the bone and the capabilities of the Army."
Keane said this move reflected a poor understanding of the last century of U.S. military history.
"The assumption that's being made in the Pentagon, and it's almost laughable if it wasn't so serious, is they don't believe the United States will involve itself in a ground war of any consequence again," Keane said. "The fact of the matter is, those assumptions have been made after World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War, and every single time they have been proven wrong. Here we are making that same assumption again."
I don't think anybody at the Obamagon necessarily believes that the U.S. will never be in a ground war of any consequence again as such; I think the Regime is trying to ensure that the U.S. will never be able to get involved in a ground war of any consequence again. Barack Obama believes that, pre-him, America was the focus of evil in the modern world, that we were the "warmongers" "arrogantly inflicting" our "bourgeois" values on "superior" foreign cultures, that we deserved to be attacked on 9/11 ("GOD DAMN AMERICA!....") and if we hadn't had so much military power we couldn't have "gotten involved" in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Call it The One's version of "pre-emption".
This isn't post-war euphoria, or a greedy pursuit of a "peace dividend," but deliberate sabotage, designed to leave the United States defenseless in a world growing logarithmically more dangerous precisely because of that sabotage.
And, one day soon, one or more or all of those enemies that were supposed to have been swept away in swooning adoration by the power of Red Barry's overrated oratory will come crashing through our borders with - take your pick - hijacked airliners again, nukes, weaponized biological agents, cyberattacks, an electromagnetic pulse attack, maybe all of the above - and America will finally get what filth like him think she's had coming to her.
And he'll get the Final Crisis he needs to cement his dictatorship.
But if that's a little too "bleep's getting real" for your taste, content yourselves with the fact that while O takes endless vacations, history takes none.
Exit question: After the terrorist nuclear attack depicted above, would Barack Obama still win a third term? And isn't the fact that that question can be seriously posed prima facie evidence that nuking the whole country would be functionally redundant?
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