Tag Archives: C-17

Shutting down national security

On October 15th, our military personnel will receive their paychecks as usual, thanks to a last-minute act of Congress passed in spite of the government shutdown affecting much of the rest of the government.

But our servicemen and women are being paid to work in a military that is rapidly being hollowed out to the point where it may be incapable of winning the nation’s wars. The federal government will not be shut down for long. The same can’t be said of those we expect to keep us safe and free.

In fact, the “fundamental” transformation promised by candidate Barack Obama in 2008 is arguably manifesting itself most dramatically in the systematic dismantling of our military capabilities. It has lately become so severe that, on September 18th, the nation’s senior officers testified to Congress that the armed services are at risk of being unable to meet even this administration’s sharply scaled-back requirements.

Recall that the President had justified the first nearly half a trillion dollars he cut from the defense budget by claiming that we no longer needed to be able to fight two wars nearly simultaneously. But at least they were supposed to be able to win one.

But now, according to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, if the sequestration process is permitted to continue to reduce Pentagon budgets over the next ten years by another half a trillion dollars, the uniformed leaders of three of the four services say they will not be able to execute even a one-war mission. And the Marine Commandant says his would have difficulty in doing so.

These dire predictions are the predictable – and predicted – results of both the sheer magnitude of the cuts themselves, compounded by the inherent, across-the-board nature of the sequestration mechanism. Insult is added to injury by the fact that the Pentagon has to bear a wildly disproportionate percentage of government-wide sequestration reductions: fifty percent of the total, even though defense represents just twenty percent of federal expenditures.

At present, every aspect of the military budget except for compensation for military personnel – including, in particular, training, operations and maintenance, procurement and research and development – is being ravaged.

What is more, regardless of the outcome of the fights over Obamacare this week, and raising the debt ceiling later this month, the structural damage resulting from the defense budget cuts to the nation’s industrial base is becoming increasingly irreparable.

The production line for the Free World’s only large military air transport aircraft, the C-17, is the latest to be threatened with termination. As with the supply chains associated with other critical weapon systems and components – from fighter aircraft to combatant warships to armored vehicles – we are seeing disruptions and, in some cases, the outright elimination of the required manufacturing capacity, especially among second- and third-tier subcontractors. Over time, such short-sighted behavior will tremendously compound the impact of the other reductions in the military’s resources and make any comeback that much more problematic.

The repercussions of such decisions are not affecting adversely just the national  security. It is also having profound repercussions in our economy, as well. The United States is losing what will shortly become over 1 million jobs. Among those bearing the burden of such losses are small businesses that have contributed for decades to our common defense. Notably, under the sequester regimen, minority-owned businesses are losing over $5 billion in revenue per year, and women-owned businesses over $2 billion per year.

Two years ago, such prospects prompted then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to warn that sequestration would be like “shooting ourselves in the head.” Regrettably, both the Republican and Democratic leadership now seem intent on pulling the trigger. Apparently, like Team Obama and Harry Reid’s Senate Democrats, the GOP now finds it easier to cut defense rather than entitlements today, even if, by so doing, they are leaving America at risk tomorrow, both in terms of our national security and our financial security.

This is a formula for disaster for the Republican Party. In addition, first and foremost, to the compelling national security considerations for supporting the practice of what Ronald Reagan called “peace through strength” and secondarily the economic ones, the GOP has another reason to challenge and reject the Obama wrecking operation with respect to the common defense. Historically, when they have steadfastly championed the unrivaled military needed in an increasingly dangerous world, Republicans have been rewarded at the polls. And when, instead, they have abandoned this part of their brand, they generally have neither earned nor received the public trust and mandate.

For all these reasons, in the difficult budget and deficit fights ahead, the Loyal Opposition must find its bearings and coalesce around a restoration of our national security, not be party to its further dismantling.

Obama’s disarmed diplomacy

In the past month, Americans have been led to believe that President Obama has achieved diplomatic breakthroughs with Syria and Iran, thereby avoiding looming conflicts with those two rogue states.  If the result being promised is not exactly “peace in our time,” the White House certainly is encouraging the notion that its robust threats of military action against these allied enemies brought them to the negotiating table.

Regrettably, this proposition does not stand up to scrutiny.  Far from a Reaganesque policy of “peace through strength” and the practice of what historian Henry Nau calls “armed diplomacy” that it has made successful in the past, Team Obama is engaged in disarmed diplomacy.  The results will, predictably, be disappointing and probably quite dangerous.

For example, with help from his Russian protectors, Syrian dictator Bashir Assad has now bought himself protection against any strike the United States might still be capable of mounting by promising to eliminate his chemical stockpiles. No amount of officially professed U.S. “skepticism” or watered-down UN resolutions can obscure an unhappy fact: Assad’s regime is not owning up to all of its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction – which includes not only more chemical weapons than it has declared, but untold quantities of deadly biological weapons, as well.

Meanwhile, as international inspectors – not a few of whom will be Russians who can be expected to run interference for their client – prepare for the hazardous, if not impossible, job of finding and eliminating all of what the Syrians have squirreled away, Assad will have a free hand to fight his Islamist and other enemies at home with conventional means. Obama’s arming of Assad’s foes, and ours, inside Syria will probably simply ensure that civil war goes murderously on for quite some time.

The prospects for a happy outcome for Obama’s disarmed diplomacy are no better with respect to Iran.  Smooth-talking Iranian leaders brought their selective charm offensive to New York last week.  In short order, they demonstrated contempt for the President by stiffing his offer of some sort of publicized encounter.

Worse, they established his desperation for a new pretext for staving off pressure from Israel and Congress for action on Iran’s incipient nuclear weapons capability.  Mr. Obama paid dearly for it: offering to begin to unravel American and multilateral sanctions in exchange for nothing more than new negotiations – albeit ones that will, we’re assured, be less protracted and more productive than each of the previous ones with this and other Iranian interlocutors.

The truth is that our adversaries, whether they be in Damascus, Tehran, Moscow, Beijing or elsewhere have not simply taken the measure this wholly inadequate American president.  They are responding to all he is doing to emasculate what has been the principal obstacle to their ambitions: our military, long the world’s finest.

It takes nothing away from the men and women who are faithfully serving their country in uniform to point out that they are not being given the wherewithal – notably the funding for training, maintenance and modernization – needed to keep the peace.

To get a proper perspective on what is being done to “fundamentally transform” our armed forces, however, one must also look beyond the condition of the military itself. A leading indicator of future incapacity to perform its mission by, among other things, making the alternative to diplomacy unappealing to our foes, can be found in the simultaneous evisceration of the nation’s defense industrial base.

To cite but one illustrative example:  Boeing announced recently that it would have to shut down the production line for the C-17, the Free World’s only modern, wide-bodied airlifter.  A sequestration-induced lack of orders from the U.S. military and uncertainty about the prospects for foreign sales would effectively foreclose future purchases of the aircraft that will be, for the foreseeable future, the backbone of our prompt power-projection capabilities.

Take no comfort from suggestions that we can always reopen the line when (not if) more C-17s are needed.  The harsh reality is that, even if the machine tools and other specialized equipment associated with manufacturing such a sophisticated airplane are not sold off, say, to China (as was done with the B-1 bomber’s production line), the workforce and highly perishable second- and third-tier suppliers are unlikely to be reassembled and certified – certainly not anytime soon.  Therefore, we must not let the C-17 line be closed.

Similar problems are to be expected with the contraction of the industrial base needed to supply tanks and other armored fighting vehicles, fighter aircraft and combatant ships.  Perhaps not right away but in due course, bad guys all over the planet will know that we lack the means to mount an effective, or at least a sustained, impediment to their aggressive designs.  That is a formula for more conflict, not peace.

The Lexington Institute’s splendid Dan Goure has warned, the U.S. military is already “unready.”  So have the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who have told Congress that if sequestration persists, they will not be able to fight even one war to assured victory.

What we have seen in the last month, and will surely witness more of in the days and years to come, is how ready our adversaries are to take advantage – diplomatically and otherwise – of our self-inflicted and unilateral disarmament.