Lowering Our Defenses

At a time when it appears America is headed into a world war – the Chinese military build-up, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, its assassinations of Israeli diplomats, and the escalating drug cartel war on our own southern border, the imminent financial collapse of southern Europe, with rioting in the streets of Athens  – Obama is planning to reduce up to 80 percent of our nuclear warheads, along with other defense cuts in his fiscal years 2013 budget proposal.

According to the House Armed Services Committee, the Navy will have to mothball nine cruisers and amphibious ships and remove 16 more vessels slated for new construction.  Six Air Force squadrons will have their wings clipped. The plan also dispenses with some 130 air-mobility planes such as the C-5 and C-130, which do critical logistics work.  The Army will reduce its force by 70,000, to some 490,000 soldiers, closing down eight Brigade Combat Teams. There will be fewer leathernecks, too, with the Marine Corps shrinking some 20,000, to around 180,000.

Meanwhile, the Iranians are nuking up.  Iran announced today that they’re going cut off oil to six countries that have opposed its nuclear program, and that they have installed domestically-made nuclear fuel rods in their Tehran reactor.  Iranian agents are assassinating Israeli diplomatic officials, riding up to their cars on motorcycles, planting magnetic bombs and then speeding away.

After World War I, Great Britain and the United States happily sank their battleships in accord with the Treaty of Versailles, leaving them vulnerable in both the Atlantic and Pacific.  Meanwhile, Germany was developing modern submarines apace, much to the distress of Winston Churchill.

Now it is China who is developing stealth submarines.  One silently popped up in the middle of an American battle group, undetected until she surfaced.  In cybertechnology, long-range missiles, submarines, and nuclear warheads, and of course, personnel, China is outpacing the United States.  Sounding very much like the British Prime Minister’s advisers in the years leading up to World War II, China is striving for parity but has not reached it yet.  Churchill’s advisors gave them the hard, exponential numbers.  But the peace-loving Liberal Party would have none of it.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “During a visit to China [in December 2011], Michele Flournoy, the U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, told a top general in the People’s Liberation Army that “the U.S. does not seek to contain China” and that “we do not view China as an adversary.”

Still, U.S. military officials are wary and chary, talk of preparations for a war with an enemy who, thanks to diplomacy and political correctness, shall not be named.  Of great concern is a new long-range missile that can strike a U.S. aircraft carrier far out at sea.  Currently, a large aircraft carrier is in the dockyards, the U.S.S. Gerald Ford.  Able to carry a complement of 4,660 crew and a formidable arsenal, the ship is already a target of China’s new long-range missile.

The object is to keep American forces far from China’s shores and sea lanes, and the islands that are in contention, particularly in the South China Sea.  The distance is too far for any manned U.S. fighter or bomber to travel and the Ford is huge, putting over 4,000 personnel at a risk of destruction by a single missile.  Large ships were a mistake both the British and the Germans avoided during World War II.  Britain’s largest ships that had evaded the downsizing were eventually sunk by German subs, one of which slipped into Scapa Flow in the northern Orkney Islands and sank the Royal Oak.

The issue at hand is the same problem that sparked the Pacific campaigns in World Wars I and II, and Vietnam – the oil in the South China Sea.  What’s more, China’s cybertechnological build up has complicated the War in Afghanistan.  Liberals denounce wars for oil, but you don’t hear them complaining about wars over rare minerals, the kind used in computers and electronics, especially when it is the Communist Chinese benefitting by the mining of these minerals in Afghanistan.  Nor do you hear Liberals denouncing China for escalating a war over the oil off the coast of Southeast Asia.  They certainly didn’t mention during the Vietnam War, a fact that would have necessarily informed Americans’ view of that conflict.

Four major American allies lie within the first island chain and China wants to control them before America can build up her bases and defend them.  Obama has agreed to rent bases in Australia, but no closer than that.

Our position in the Middle East is just as bad, and Americans, disgusted with Islamist radicalism, are content to let them kill each other, and leave Europe to its own fate.  America is in retreat, looking very much like the shrinking circle of defense at the Dunkirk beachhead.  Churchill wrote that no war was ever won by evacuation, although it was absolutely necessary in that case, Britain had only enough manpower to defend her own shores; she could give no thought to an offensive war until she had enough armor and enough manpower.  She had to rely on a reluctant America to supply the deficiencies, and the manpower didn’t arrive until 1943.

This administration is forcing America to circle her wagons.  We have the ability to defend freedom.  We have the intelligence to understand that free trade is critical to a free world.  We can also understand that an isolated America will not long endure in a totalitarian world.  We have the manpower, the will power.  What we have lost is the manufacturing power, and what we definitely don’t have presently is the leadership.  A lesser country would have held a special election to get rid of this obvious danger to our nation’s future.

The presidential elections are now 10 months away.  Long enough for the current occupant of the White House to decimate our military, put the final nail in our economy’s coffin, and lock us into a permanent bureaucracy where a parent can be fined or arrested by the School Lunch Police.