Speak Softly and Carry a Small Stick

President Theodore Roosevelt’s international policies were shaped by his personal motto, "speak softly and carry a big stick,” which Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men updated to a modern version, “Walk softly and carry an armored tank division, I always say.”

Nicholson’s character, Col. Nathan R. Jessup, understood the threats of a modern world.

In his Omaha Beach speech for the 40th anniversary of D-Day, President Ronald Reagan said, “We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we may always be free.” Then two months later, upon accepting the Republican presidential nomination for a second term, he said, “None of the four wars in my lifetime came about because we were too strong. It's weakness that invites adventurous adversaries to make mistaken judgments.”

Weakness indeed.

In announcing last month his new strategy for the country’s military, Obama made it clear that America’s future military will be a much smaller stick, perhaps a switch. It was President Franklin D. Roosevelt who coined the term “arsenal of democracy” when describing the United States in a speech given a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Since FDR’s administration, the size of our arsenal has ebbed and flowed – flowing to fight wars and ebbing during the ensuing peace. The arsenal of democracy, which has gotten smaller every year of the Obama administration, will now get even smaller.

After summarizing his strategic review in a speech given in the Pentagon surrounded by all of the military’s top brass, Obama said “we can’t afford to repeat the mistakes that have been made in 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. Not on my watch.”

I assume by “ill-prepared” in reference to World War II and Vietnam, Obama meant the deep draw-downs following those conflicts which left the American military so emasculated it was unsuited to deal with the next conflict. But that is precisely what Obama’s plan will do. His actions don’t comport with his rhetoric.

For decades military doctrine has been driven by the ability to fight two wars concurrently and have a two-ocean Navy. Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrated a military that struggled to fight two wars – and they were in the same theater of operations! Obama’s proposed cuts will reduce not only military spending, but also military capability.

Last summer, military spending was cut by $487 billion over the next decade – about 8% of the Pentagon’s budget. When the so-called Congressional super-committee failed to agree on a $1.2 trillion reduction in government spending last fall, automatic cuts kicked in. Unless Congress intervenes, these cuts will include another $600 billion reduction in military spending. Hundreds of billions in additional reductions will also occur when the withdrawals from Afghanistan and Iraq are complete. So conceivably military spending will fall by more than 30% over the next decade. That’s the spending side.

On the capability side, boots on the ground will be replaced by drones and cyber-weapons. Troop levels will be reduced by 76,000 to 114,000 – about the level they were at the end of the Clinton administration and 600,000 fewer than at the end of the Cold War. The Navy will shrink to 238 vessels from its current 300, which will take two carrier groups out of action. Strategic bombers will be reduced from 153 to 101 and the number of fighter aircraft will be cut in half – from 3,600 planes to 1,500. Meanwhile the production of F-22 fighter, the heavy lifter C-17 transport aircraft, and the DDG-1000 Zumwalt destroyer has already been shut down.

Of course bloated entitlement and domestic spending programs need not fear Obama’s budget-cutting knife.

If Congress fails to intervene and prevent the automatic $600 billion reduction in military spending, the Pentagon budget will be cut by a trillion dollars in the next decade, which Defense Secretary Panetta and defense hawks say will be ruinous to our national security. Yet Obama said he would veto any bill that prevented the $600 billion in defense cuts. You can be sure that the champagne corks are popping from Tehran to Beijing.

Obama may be the smartest President to hold the office, but he has learned little from the lessons of history. Harry Truman inherited the tail-end of World War II and an army of 12 million. He reduced it to less than a half million and tried to eliminate the Marine Corps altogether. Truman had hated the Marine Corps since his Army service in World War I, calling them nothing more than the Navy’s police force. Thankfully, Congress prevented him from shutting down the Marines, whose long history goes back to 1775. However, Truman slimmed down the military to the point that it was unable to contest the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950, and at one point the only territory under American control was within a small perimeter around the Pusan harbor. Three years and a month after the war began, a truce was declared with the North-South Korean border about where it was before the war but at a cost of 37,000 Americans killed and 92,000 wounded. Perhaps it can be said that America didn’t lose that war; but it sure didn’t win it.

Under the Eisenhower administration, the Korean War wound down and the Cold War heated up. The American armed forces were cut in half by the former five-star general and defense spending was cut by 27%. Eisenhower’s national defense strategy, called the “New Look” (before it became the new “New Look”) consisted of deterrence based on nuclear weapons and long-range bombers. His defense policy of containment and keeping the Soviets out of Western Europe would have blown up the entire planet. It became apparent that neither the US nor the Soviet wanted to use nuclear weapons except for a direct homeland attack. Oh well, back to the drawing board. Eisenhower’s new “New Look” rejiggered the mutually assured destruction of strategic weaponry (the old “New Look”) to refocus on tactical nuclear weaponry. But Eisenhower’s reliance on nuclear weapons was still driven by the economics of supporting a nuclear arsenal versus the economics of supporting a large troop-based military. Both the old “New Look” and the new “New Look” military were totally unsuited for a conventional war.

Therefore, the next Cold War conflict – Vietnam – which President Kennedy blundered into and President Johnson accelerated, found the military unprepared once again. The North Vietnamese waged a guerilla war in jungle terrain that could hide a division from land and sky. Except fighting wasn’t done by divisions or behind battle lines. It was done by detached small forces. None of our super-weapons worked in this environment. Any plane that flew faster than about 350 knots was ineffective, and ultimately tactics shifted to napalm, carpet bombing, and orange (an herbicide that was only called Agent Orange after the war.) Over the course of the Vietnam war, 2.6 million Americans served in it in rotation assignments, 58,000 of whom were killed and 300,000 of whom were wounded.

President Nixon inherited the Vietnam War and decided to turn it over to the South Vietnamese army and get out of Dodge – which he did in 1973, helped by the fact that Congress cut off support for it that year. Left to its own resources, Saigon fell in 1975. Afterwards the American army became an all-volunteer organization and was reduced to 16 divisions – about 200,000 troops. This was accomplished by deactivating the reserves and National Guard and relying on a small regular army. Defense spending was cut by 29%. Fortunately, the world was without a major conflict for 25 years following Vietnam, so Nixon’s military downsizing was never tested.

Nixon left office in disgrace and the interregnum of President Ford was too brief to impact national defense. His defense budget documents, however, reveal a deep mistrust of the Soviets and a concern that our military capabilities were eroding through disinvestment, posing a serious security risk to the country. President Carter, in contrast, was untroubled by the Soviet march toward nuclear and military superiority. The tone of his administration was set in his inaugural aspiration for “the elimination of all nuclear weapons from this Earth” – a hope similarly and naively held by Obama. Carter took a relaxed view of the Soviet threat and championed a left-leaning elitist view that the US and Soviet had morally equivalent claims in the world. Carter’s naiveté led to a defense posture based on the hope that Soviet accommodation would eliminate the need to improve the capability of the military – a naiveté writ large in his botched rescue of the Iranian hostages.

President Reagan refused to continue the failed legacy of his predecessors and ended the Cold War by outspending the Soviets. Exhausted by trying to keep up with US military superiority, the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and the entire Soviet Union unraveled in 1991. America became the world’s only superpower. Although Reagan’s defense spending fell through most of his second term, the military buildup of his first term was sufficient to allow President George H. W. Bush to win the first Gulf War handily. Yet, throughout the Bush-Clinton administrations, defense spending as a percentage of GDP continued to decline and was less than 3.5% at the end of Clinton’s second term. President George W. Bush was set to continue this trend except for 9/11, which led to increased spending for the Iraq and Afghan wars – both of which were incompetently managed because politicians tried to win them on the cheap.

As the late Paul Harvey often said, freedom isn’t free. We must maintain global military superiority if for no other reason than to make other options to war possible. Reagan correctly observed that weakness – even the perception of weakness – invites aggression.

Cutting our military to pay for the fiscal excesses of entitlement spending, bailouts, and stimulus give-aways won’t solve the causes that have put our economy into a tailspin. During his confirmation hearing for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Martin Dempsey said “National security didn’t cause the debt crisis, nor will it solve it.” Nor is stripping the military in order to increase domestic spending – which Obama wants to do – a proper use of the taxpayer’s money. If Obama has his way, then instead of being able to fight two wars concurrently, our military will be able to fight one war and – well, cross its fingers.

The purpose of our government is to do for us the things we are unable to do for ourselves. National defense is one of them. In fact national defense is the only mandated responsibility of the federal government under the Constitution. Everything else in the Constitution is either a restriction of government authority or a specifically enumerated authority without a requirement to use it. Six of the 17 enumerated powers in Article 1, Section 8 deal with national defense – the largest category of governance in that list.

Under the Constitution only Congress is granted authority to declare war, raise and support an army, provide and maintain a navy, make rules to govern the military, mobilize militias to enforce laws in domestic unrest, and impress militias into national military service. The only authority granted to the President regarding national defense is to be Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy. Nothing more. He is certainly not empowered to weaken our defense.

I have no argument with those who claim there is waste in military spending. We’ve all heard of thousand dollar toilets and hundred dollar screwdrivers. Waste in government, whether in military or domestic programs, should be eliminated even if we were running a trillion dollar surplus instead of a trillion dollar deficit.

But as I said in last week’s blog, we live in a dangerous world. While our attention is currently focused on terrorism, we can’t ignore the threats of a near-nuclear Iran, a boy general in charge of Korea and its nuclear weapons, a resurgent Russia, and a China whose aim is to deny the American military a presence in the Pacific region. Despite the heat that the second President Bush took from the Left for saying it, these countries represent an axis of evil that could become allied in a war against America.

Moreover, there are second tier threats from countries like unstable Pakistan, Marxist-Communist Peru and Venezuela, Brazil’s tilt toward China, and unrest in Africa.

We can’t combat any of these threats with a video game military reliant on drones, cyber-weapons, missiles, and death rays. Nor can we rely on a military which attempts to fight a bloodless war with aircraft, ships, and submarines as the military’s critics want. Navies and air forces don’t win wars. They support troops on the ground that must always be the tip of the American spear.

We cannot afford to elect politicians who do not consider that an attack on Israel or Taiwan is a serious possibility – a possibility that will force our Commander-in-Chief to support our allies. But whether the next war involves one or both of these hot spots … whether it is started by a member of the axis of evil … or an alliance among them (most likely China and Iran) … whether it is a conventional or nuclear war … I believe there will be a serious war within the next four years, I’m sad to say.

My daily prayer is that Barack Obama will not be responsible for conducting it.