From Pine View Farm

National Defense Neglected 3

My son’s employer is not getting properly taken care of:

. . . the Bush administration’s strategic miscalculations and gross mismanagement of resources have pushed the all-volunteer force perilously close to its breaking point. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has refused to reconsider his pre-September 11 commitment to transform the Army into a smaller and more agile fighting force, even though one clear lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan has been that the Army is suffering more from manpower deficiencies than from the absence of high-tech weaponry. Pentagon officials have lately sought to emphasize the positive–the Army is currently meeting its 2006 recruiting and retention goals, and the readiness levels for forces in combat in Iraq remain stable–but this neglects the underlying reality. The responsibility of Bush and the Republican Congress is to ensure that, even during war, the all-volunteer military is ready for future combat. They are currently failing to do so.

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3 comments

  1. Opie

    September 13, 2006 at 8:58 pm

    The problem is that the Democrats drove around with too many “Wouldn’t it be nice if schools had all the money they needed and the Air Force had to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber?” bumper stickers for too long to be credible proponents of a strong defense. People can change, parties can change, but it takes a while to convince people that the change is real.

     
  2. Frank

    September 14, 2006 at 8:06 pm

    Hmmmmm. I would say that those folks represented a very small subset of Democrats.

    But, yes, it does take a long time to for people to believe that change is real.

    Especially when coals of lies are thrown on the fires of fear.

    But, frankly, this has little to do with the currrent Federal Administration’s failed stewardship of the nation’s military.

     
  3. Opie

    September 14, 2006 at 8:38 pm

    OK, but to call them a very small subset would require a certain amount of denial, I would think. They were (and probably still are) a substantial and influential percentage of the party.

    In a certain sense, it will take a generation for the Democrats to free themselves of the accomodationist image they have. In the eyes of many grass roots center-right baby boomers, they are the anti-any-war party just as much as they are the tax-and-spend party. And demographically, that’s a big bubble of votes that won’t go away for another twenty years.