Posted on 01/12/2009 6:48:07 PM PST by Kaslin
Defense: President-elect Obama wants to jump-start the economy by spending on infrastructure. How about spending more on our military and ships like the USS George H. W. Bush?
The planes that will fly off her 4.5-acre flight deck will give future presidents options other than retreat. She will defend America and be the most effective instrument of foreign policy devised by man.
She's a fine ship, but she is only one ship. We no longer have President Reagan's 600-ship Navy. We have very capable ships, but not nearly enough to meet our commitments stretching from the Taiwan Strait to the Persian Gulf and beyond.
The Navy, which reached 568 ships in the late 1980s, struggles today to sustain a fleet of 279. That's roughly at the size it was on the eve of World War I. A recent Congressional Quarterly article warned that China by itself will possess nearly twice as many submarines as the U.S. by 2010, and is likely to have a larger fleet by 2015, possibly including a carrier of its own.
By law, the Navy is required to maintain an 11-carrier fleet. But caught in a budgetary bind, the Navy in May asked Congress to waive that requirement. This would allow the retirement of CVN-65 Enterprise, the carrier off which John McCain flew, and avoid $2.2 billion in annual maintenance to keep the 50-year-old workhorse at sea.
(Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorials.com ...
Them ain’t votes. No haps.
Wishful thinking. The military officially goes to the bottom of the pile in about 7 days.
We no longer had an arsenal when we stopped making machine tools in this country.
How about two more Army Divisions and more Marines?
Jumpstarting a defense buildup will be the job of O’s successor, sort of the same way it fell to Reagan after Carter.
He won’t do it for two reasons:
1. Obama despises the military
2. Disarmament is one of the bargaining chips he will use with Russia and China to try to get them to apply pressure to Iran.
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