{"id":28174,"date":"2012-01-03T13:16:39","date_gmt":"2012-01-03T17:16:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=28174"},"modified":"2012-01-07T05:52:21","modified_gmt":"2012-01-07T09:52:21","slug":"panetta-our-post-cuts-military-a-spoiler-force","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=28174","title":{"rendered":"Panetta: Our post-cuts military a “spoiler” force"},"content":{"rendered":"

The front page of my New York Times greeted me this morning with this headline above the fold:<\/p>\n

Panetta to Offer Strategy Cutting Military<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Oh, good. Panetta, who I really don’t think is all that bad a guy, testified in November<\/a> that forcing the military to take an additional $500 some billion cut, past the already pending $450 billion, would be \u201cdevastating\u201d to the military and pose a \u201csubstantial risk\u201d to national security. He underscored the point that our defense budget is reflective of the threat we face and reducing military spending by a trillion dollars won’t reduce the threat level, only create an enviroment were we are unable to respond to it. His most prophetic statement was this:<\/p>\n

…we would have to formulate a new security strategy that accepted substantial risk of not meeting our defense needs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fast forward less than two months to today where the unholy alliance of “burn it all down” libertarian Republicans and anti-military liberal Democrats have produced an environment in which the sabotage of our military and its members wasn’t significant enough incentive to reach a deal. According to the NY Times:<\/p>\n

In a shift of doctrine driven by fiscal reality and a deal last summer that kept the United States from defaulting on its debts, Mr. Panetta is expected to outline plans for carefully shrinking the military \u2014 and in so doing make it clear that the Pentagon will not maintain the ability to fight two sustained ground wars at once.<\/p>\n

Instead, he will say that the military will be large enough to fight and win one major conflict, while also being able to \u201cspoil\u201d a second adversary\u2019s ambitions<\/strong> in another part of the world while conducting a number of other smaller operations, like providing disaster relief or enforcing a no-flight zone.<\/p>\n

Pentagon officials, in the meantime, are in final deliberations about potential cuts to virtually every important area of military spending: the nuclear arsenal, warships, combat aircraft, salaries, and retirement and health benefits.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For those who remember history it was our “peace dividend” post World War Two “spoiler” force which was left to defend South Korea as an avalanche of North Korea soldiers flooded the peninsula before finally being stopped at Pusan by an ad-hoc fire brigade of old World War Two Marines brought together from every naval garrison and motor pool in the world. Once you get over the 100,000 wounded and 37,000 dead Americans it was a triumphant spoiler of a conflict. The millions of North Koreans living in a waking nightmare this very moment might have some other thoughts but hey, guns or butter, right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The front page of my New York Times greeted me this morning with this headline above … Panetta: Our post-cuts military a “spoiler” force<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":619,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89,189,84,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress-sucks","category-defense-cuts","category-military-issues","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/619"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28174\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}