Defense: Is Obama cutting too deeply?

last updated 8 January 2015

So much for American military supremacy, said Arthur Herman in NationalReview.com. President Obama last week announced cuts of nearly $500 billion in defense spending over 10 years, thereby putting the U.S. military “on the road to second-class status.” Under his new defense strategy, the Pentagon will be forced to abandon its long-standing goal of having enough troops to fight two wars at once, as the Army is reduced from 570,000 troops to 490,000. Future weapons projects like the F-35 fighter jet will be cut or frozen. These cuts are dangerously shortsighted, said The Washington Post in an editorial. With the war in Iraq over, and Afghanistan winding down, Obama believes the U.S. will no longer need the ability to launch troop-intensive invasions. But with the “Middle East in revolution, an increasingly belligerent Iran, and a North Korea undergoing an unpredictable leadership transition,” who knows what the future will bring?

Let’s have some perspective, please, said The Denver Post. “With the national debt at $15.1 trillion and counting,” we have no choice but to downsize the world’s most expensive military, which has ballooned in size and cost since 9/11. Obama’s proposed spending cuts represent just 8 percent of the $6 trillion in military spending planned for the next decade. And while “budgetary necessity may have been the mother” of Obama’s new strategy, said the Los Angeles Times, it still makes sound military sense. Rather than large deployments of troops, the U.S. would rely more on special operations forces and unmanned drones to take out threats, like Islamist militants in Yemen and Somalia. A smaller, more agile military could make the country more secure, not less.

In reality, Obama’s defense plan is hardly revolutionary, said Doyle McManus in the Los Angeles Times. The Pentagon has already abandoned its two-war doctrine, as we learned in 2003 when it pulled troops out of Afghanistan to fight in Iraq. And while our ground forces will shrink, the Defense Department has a plan to quickly boost troop levels in case “a future president decides to wage two wars after all.” For now, though, the president chose to take an ax to the Pentagon to spare domestic spending, said Jennifer Rubin in WashingtonPost.com. Fortunately, “we have an election coming up,’’ which will give the American people final say. Should national security be “the first priority’’ of the federal government, or not?