Defense Panel: Obama Making U.S. Too Weak

by Sam Rolley / Personal Liberty Digest

FILE

The National Defense Panel appointed to conduct independent reviews of the Nation’s military readiness warned last week that President Barack Obama is making the U.S. Armed Forces too weak to respond to growing global threats.

A new report out from the panel said that defense budget cuts and the Obama Administration’s assertions that the U.S. should have a smaller military in the President’s 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) leave the U.S. with a military that is “inadequate given the future strategic and operational environment.”

According to the defense experts, the U.S. is in need of upgrades and expansions to meet global challenges that cause the Nation to have to respond to multiple threats at once.

From the report:

The Air Force now fields the smallest and oldest force of combat aircraft in its history yet needs a global surveillance and strike force able to rapidly deploy to theaters of operation to deter, defeat, or punish multiple aggressors simultaneously. As a result of the budget constraints imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act, the Air Force’s Bomber, Fighter and Surveillance forces are programmed to drawdown to approximately 50% of the current inventory by 2019. In the panel’s opinion, the programmed reduction in the Air Force’s decisive enabling capabilities will put this nation’s national security strategy at much higher risk and therefore recommends increasing the number of manned and unmanned aircraft capable of conducting both ISR and long range strike in contested airspace.

We are convinced the 2014 QDR’s contemplated reduction in Army end strength goes too far. We believe the Army and the Marine Corps should not be reduced below their pre-9/11 end-strengths – 490,000 active-duty soldiers in the Army and 182,000 active Marines–bearing in mind that capability cannot always substitute for capacity.

According to the panel, the White House’s current plan for the military is focused too heavily on providing justification for defense spending cuts and not enough on keeping the U.S. in a strong position to respond to global threats.

In order for the military to be powerful enough to protect the Nation, the defense experts argue, the U.S.’s fighting force must be able to operate equally in multiple theaters.

“We find the logic of the two-war construct to be as powerful as ever and note that the force sizing construct in the 2014 QDR strives to stay within the two-war tradition while using different language.

But given the worsening threat environment, we believe a more expansive force sizing construct — one that is different from the two-war construct but no less strong — is appropriate.”