What Happened to Preserve, Protect, and Defend?

American Thinker

How  does a president of the United States whose allegiance is to his country  knowingly and in plain sight sabotage his nation’s defenses?  Until  recently, the discussions of severe military cuts remained in the appropriate  realm of working groups, and few seriously considered Obama’s radical campaign  promises to eliminate nuclear weapons from the U.S. arsenal to be of any real  validity.  After all, many Democrat presidential contenders before Obama  had pandered to pacifists and the armies of the naïve swelling the Democratic  base in order to get elected.  But none of these individuals actually took proactive steps to completely remove  America’s nuclear triad from the list of strategic options.

Our ability to  instill fear in the hearts of our enemies, both current and future, was left  unquestioned by all previous presidents, minor reductions in stockpiles  notwithstanding.

Obama  has done what no guardian of America would do: systematically tear down the  most vital of America’s defenses, all while America’s enemies wait with bated  breath for the nation that owes trillions in debt to be left standing defenseless.  What happens when America lays down its  arms?  It seems Obama would like to find out.  Americans may be the  unintended (intended?) victims of a perverse social  experiment.

Leaks  from high-level defense sources reveal that in addition to commitments under the  New START agreement, which brings the total number of deliverable U.S. warheads  to 1,000 — an unacceptably low number that prevents the U.S. from being able to  destroy the 3,000 priority strategic targets identified by the DoD — Obama now plans  to implement an 80-percent force  reduction that will leave America with only 300 deliverable warheads.  Such  a move is suicidal.  Such a low number is wholly insufficient to protect  America from the growing list of dangerous and erratic nuclear regimes with  global ambitions.  Even more crucial to understanding the risk inherent in  such a decision is the role of U.S. nuclear weapons stockpiles as a  deterrent.

Americans  have only been able to live the cushy, carefree existence of the last  half-century — now taken for granted by new generations of youngsters who have  known only prosperity and for whom Cold War politics are moot — because the  U.S. possessed a credible nuclear arsenal capable of devastating any  adversary.  It is because of, not in spite of, America’s nuclear assets  that America has survived multiple existential threats.

The  danger of nuclear confrontation has increased, not decreased, since the end of  the Cold War.  The likelihood of nuclear exchange has increased rapidly,  mirroring the acquisition of nuclear weapons by small and medium-sized states,  with multiple hostile nuclear powers now vying for global influence.  Obama  is at best gravely naïve if he is pursuing drastic and suicidal cuts to our  arsenal at the present time.

Obama  has been busy gutting American conventional forces as well.

The  Army and the Marines are to be significantly downsized,  even as their global commitments expand.  Consequently, America can no  longer simultaneously  fight two major wars in two theaters of deployment, a capability deemed vital by  defense insiders to ensuring America’s defense against coalitions of aggressor  states, and now a plausible scenario owing to the Russian military buildup in  the Middle East and the increasingly belligerent actions of China on every front.  Both  nations are in a Warsaw-Pact prototype alliance called the Shanghai Cooperation  Organization that openly challenges U.S. leadership and engages in maneuvers in  which the United States is the target.  Iran is also a member of this  organization.  Eliminating the two-war capability would seem  ill-advised.  But then, Obama probably knows this.

The  Navy thinly escaped Obama’s hacksaw.  Recent studies commissioned by DoD  indicate that the present number of aircraft carrier battle groups is not  sufficient to maintain an adequate defensive posture in the Pacific, where  U.S.-Taiwanese forces are under constant threat of nuclear exchange with  China.  Even though the number of carrier groups is already below normal,  Obama had wanted to cut another carrier battle group from the  fleet.  The Navy torpedoed the move, but not without cost.   Modernization efforts have been canned, and shipbuilding will be greatly slowed, which will cause the  fleet to shrink by approximately 70 ships in the 2020s.

Enter  and exit the U.S. Air Force.  The Air Force has been forced to lose several  hundred planes, even though its present number is already below the threshold  admittedly needed to carry out tactical bombing campaigns.  In Bosnia, when  the Air Force was a few times larger than today, it took 40 percent of active  aircraft to execute the campaign.  Can anyone seriously argue that the U.S.  Air Force, which needed nearly half of its resources to prosecute Bosnia, can  actually manage a conflict involving multiple major powers at one time,  especially if cuts of the magnitude enacted go  unchallenged?

America’s  president has done more to harm American security than our greatest foes could  ever dream of doing, and he has done it with both eyes wide open, willingly,  with full knowledge of the implications, which raises the obvious question: what  word describes a president who will do this to his own country?  The recent  Medvedev revelations  are a good indicator of Obama’s interest in satisfying Russian demands  in  ways that would be unpopular with the American people.

Obama  admittedly seeks the eradication of American superpower status.   Even if a case can be made for a reduced U.S. footprint worldwide or for a less  interventionist foreign policy, would a loyal American knowingly seek to  undermine his or her nation’s greatness merely to satisfy some philosophical  pretense to equality with “everybody else”?

The  time for pretense is over.  Obama is no friend of  America.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/03/what_happened_to_preserve_protect_and_defend.html#ixzz1qShHFT1h