The Vasectomy

The military cuts outlined by President Barack Obama at the Pentagon Thursday show “incompetence” in understanding the nation’s national security needs and the defense strategy is not “coherent” as the nation’s military leaders are ignored in the Obama administration’s defining a military direction.

Ah, you see, the army Is ah, ah, costing ah, you money, ah, ah 

I’m not talking about a coherent national security strategy, what the president laid out is very dangerous and it really does show incompetence in understanding a feasible national security strategy. He did not talk about how we go forward on the 21st century battlefield and our ability to engage, deter, and strike the enemy when necessary. We cannot sit around and say we won’t fight a second combat operation because the enemy has a vote in this.

What we need to be able to do is sit down and look at our geographical area of responsibility, and start examining the threat for the next 10 to 20 years, and come up with the requirements, and capability, and capacity that our military needs to be able to meet these threats, because if we continue to go down this path, like we did after World War II when we gutted the military to such a degraded state that the first Army battalion that showed up on the battlefield in Korea was absolutely decimated — I don’t want to see that type of things happen to the greatest military ever, and my friends and also thre of my relatives that’s still serving in the military.

The aims to cut at least $487 billion from the Pentagon's 10-year budget by downsizing the Army and Marine Corps while bulking up the Navy and Air Force in the Asia-Pacific region, and increase the military's supply of unmanned drone fleets, special operations forces, and cyber-weaponry. "Our military will be leaner," Obama said, "but the world must know — the United States is going to maintain our military superiority with armed forces that are agile, flexible, and ready for the full range of contingencies and threats." Is it a smart strategy to rely more on drones while cutting ground forces? I don't believe so, history has already taught us this critical lesson. 

It's a mistake to cut ground forces, virtually every president since World War II has cut the Army to buy more ships and planes, and from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq, all those cuts backfired. Obama thinks we'll "confront China with technology rather than people." But remember, "we cannot pick our enemies; our enemies will pick us." And, as they have for 70 years, our foes will wage ground wars and terrorist attacks because we already dominate the sea and air and space. We'll regret these troop cuts.

The devil's in the details and not every president gets it right on security strategy,  but it's indisputable that advanced technologies now allows for leaner forces with quicker results. Still, we won't know the details of Obama's plan until he submits his budget to Congress later this month. It will then be up to the legislative branch to ensure that our new strategy is bipartisan, not dictated simply by what the national budget will allow, and, most importantly, true to the federal government's primary role; "Defense of the country."

I can tell you that  the guidance he gave was not oriented towards how we have a strategy to contend with threats across the world — it’s more so based on a budget analysis.

The U.S. military would delay the most expensive weapons programs such as Lockheed Martin's F-35 fighter. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has been delayed and hit with cost overruns. It also has been at the center of a political battle that included some of Ohio's Congressmen working to pave the way for the Pentagon to consider an alternative engine for the fighter that was under development by GE Aviation.

Unemployed Homeless Veteran

American soldiers will return home to face a new battle — unemployment. The Bureau of Labor and Statistics says unemployment rates for veterans ages 20 to 24 are close to 30 percent — nearly double that of their young civilian counterparts. One issue is that many soldiers begin their service right out of high school. Groups such as Volunteers of America, are helping vets who lack the education needed to be competitive in the current workforce.

Last month California’s overall unemployment rate dropped to 11.3 percent. Still, many troops returning from Iraq plan to reenlist simply because there are too few jobs to come home to.

Cut to active duty U.S. army from its current size of nearly 570,000 members to 490,000 fewer soldiers. The didn’t offer an exact figure on cuts to the Marine Corps, but there are 200,000 active duty Marines. A 10 percent cut would translate to 20,000 fewer Marines than there are today, and a 15 percent cut would mean 30,000 fewer Marines, or should I say, future unemployed.

We cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the past — after World War II, after Vietnam — when our military was left ill-prepared for the future. As commander in chief, I will not let that happen again, Unfortunately, Obama’s plan does exactly that. It forgets the lessons of history.