Outlaw War Now!

Michael Fumento, Weekly Standard, RCP, exposes the Democrats' ignorance and grandstanding on defense. Read his essay on our military and its special units. The defense budget is the only one Democrats ever want to cut. President Clinton cut the defense budget to the bone and ran our troops ragged in police actions around the world, while depleting our cruise missile stocks with sporadic and useless hits on a few empty buildings.

We need to replace equipment and increase the size of our forces at least back to where we were before the end of the Cold War.

President Bush has acknowledged some of these problems with a proposed fiscal year 2008 defense budget increase of 11.3 percent or $481.4 billion. Yet an October Congressional Budget Office report indicates that may be far too small, that DoD will require an annual average of about $560 billion through 2024 to pay for ordered weapons and rising operational and personnel costs. So far the Democrats, while promising to do so, have not yet directly challenged defense spending. Let's hope they don't try to use their special ops doubling fantasy as leverage. If they really want to demonstrate how they've become advocates of national defense, they should earmark that extra $80 billion that the CBO report says is required.

Sheer numbers of troops and sophisticated and well-maintained equipment are no substitute for the skills and courage of Special Operations Forces. But neither can SOF substitute for a large army of well-trained and disciplined troops or for top-quality, operative hardware. We obtained our "peace dividend" by gutting the military.

Democrats may say they want to defeat terrorists (apparently it was in their written plan for their first 100 hours, I haven't actually heard much actual talk from them about defeating terrorists.)---but saying doesn't make it so. The "Outlaw War Now" Democrats are about as effective in the execution of our foreign policy as they are with their "Ban Bad Guys" prescription for Homeland Security.

Related posts: Terror Tactics Hit Home, Death And Politics, Obscene Amenities, Dead Souls Democrats

UPDATE: As noted in the comments, Michael Fumento's home site has this referenced article with links and pix.