The Department of Defense plans to scale down the nation's Army to its pre-World War II size and do away with an entire class of Air Force attack jets in an attempt to cut military spending, which mushroomed after the attacks of September 11, 2001, according to reports. More: security.blogs.cnn.com.
National Defense is job number one of the Federal government. Has anyone else noticed that global tensions are rising? Is this really the time to reduce our military when those threatening our security are becoming ever more boisterous?
I'm surprised by the number of folks that believe this is a good idea.
I'd like you to name one military action over the last thirty years that actually responded to an immediate threat to the United States homeland.
No, we weren't ready for WWII because our military was too small, wasn't funded enough. In fact we were so ill prepared that it is only because England held out for so long that we could gear up for the war. Had England not held out so long odds are we may not have won, or the war would have went on much longer.
By and large, yes.
America has changed and grown. Our security issues in an interconnected world aren't the same. We may need to spend slightly more proportional to GDP than we did before World War II.
But our present military is at its size for power projection. It is emphatically not to make us safer and it does not make the world safer.