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Yes, the military is strained. Yes, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are tiring out U.S. soldiers and equipment. And yes, defense spending is dangerously low. But these facts shouldn't give our enemies hope, yet. As Peter Brookes explains, U.S. forces are more than capable enough to respond to any of the three most likely threats: Iran, China, and North Korea.
Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker has issued strong warnings to Congress about repeat deployments and their toll on the army's health and welfare. The Marines, ever reluctant to complain, concur. The Army/Marine ops tempo should give us pause. But that doesn't mean Uncle Sam can't handle another fight if necessary--thanks to the Navy and Air Force. Sure, it would be tough, but let me explain...
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Brian Riedl and Baker Spring explain what's wrong with the supplemental. So much for all those pledges of fiscal responsibility and all the lip service about supporting the troops...
The troops in Iraq and Afghanistan--whom this legislation was originally designed for--have become merely a bargaining chip for a Congress that could never pass this additional $21 billion [in pork-barrel spending] on its own. Lawmakers are effectively telling President Bush that the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot have their body armor unless Congress gets $16 million for additional office space in the House of Representatives.
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Will China's apparent new capability to knock out satellites change the minds of those who would deny the United States similar weapons and capabilities?
Details emerging from space sources indicate that the Chinese Feng Yun 1C (FY-1C) polar orbit weather satellite launched in 1999 was attacked by an asat system launched from or near the Xichang Space Center. The attack is believed to have occurred as the weather satellite flew at 530 mi. altitude 4 deg. west of Xichang located in Sichuan province. Xichang is a major Chinese space launch center.
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"All of us want to find a way to bring America's sons and daughters home again, but as the president has made clear, we simply cannot afford to fail in the Middle East," Gates said yesterday at the Pentagon after Vice President Cheney swore him in as the nation's 22nd defense secretary. "Failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility, and endanger Americans for decades to come."
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The Army needs resources today, or the U.S. will face the far greater expense of fixing a "hollow force" in the near future.
In particularly blunt testimony, Schoomaker said the Army began the Iraq war "flat-footed" with a $56 billion equipment shortage and 500,000 fewer soldiers than during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Echoing the warnings from the post-Vietnam War era, when Gen. Edward C. Meyer, then the Army chief of staff, decried the "hollow Army," Schoomaker said it is critical to make changes now to shore up the force for what he called a long and dangerous war. "The Army is incapable of generating and sustaining the required forces to wage the global war on terror . . . without its components -- active, Guard and reserve -- surging together," Schoomaker said in testimony before the congressionally created Commission on the National Guard and Reserves.
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On a practical level, universal service would be a massive boondoggle. Rangel's 2003 draft bill called for inducting all young people 18 to 26 years old living in the United States - citizens or not - for two years. Even if the plan were scaled back to include only 18- and 19-year-old citizens, the government would spend billions of dollars to screen, train, house and pay millions of people. To do what? The armed services have no use for most of them. Either they'd displace current workers or they'd be assigned to jobs that have been left unfilled because they're not worth paying much for.
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Cognitive dissonance?
Mr. Rangel is a long-standing advocate of reinstating the draft, but Mr. Kane said conscription would wreak havoc by drawing more undereducated and unintelligent people into the force. "A draft would almost certainly be a disaster," the analyst said. Mr. Rangel has said that his draft proposal has little chance of becoming law. However, he rejected the Heritage findings and insisted yesterday that a formal Congressional examination of the military's demographics will prove him right. "Once we are able to get hearings on this, everyone will see what they already know, and that is that those who have the least opportunities at this age find themselves in the military, as I did when I was 18 years old," the congressman said.
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Somehow this is not surprising.
The same study found that young black men in Philadelphia have a death rate 11 percent higher than troops in Iraq.
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Pressed by the demands of fighting insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Army has been unable to maintain proficiency in the kind of high-intensity mechanized warfare that toppled Saddam Hussein and would be needed again if the Army were called on to fight in Korea or in other future crises, senior officers acknowledge... The Army's senior leaders say there is scant time to train troops in high-intensity skills and to practice large-scale mechanized maneuvers when combat brigades return home. With barely 12 months between deployments, there is hardly enough time to fix damaged gear and train new soldiers in counterinsurgency operations. Some units have the time to train but find their tanks are either still in Iraq or in repair depots.
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A reaction to Fukuyama's 9 lessons of 9/11.
Fukuyama has done some brilliant work in his career, but when it comes to national security his notions are surprisingly simplistic and often marred by omissions of basic analysis. And it shows in this post; he would have been better off not writing it.
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Mortgaging our military might and soldiers' safety to fund pork projects. Just brilliant.
The Army is paying a price for congressional budget tactics, said Baker Spring, a defense analyst and fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Congress will cut DOD’s base budget and use emergency supplement bills to hide personal projects, Spring said. Congress uses those methods to get around spending caps, which are not present in the supplemental spending bills, he said. Congress'€™ use of legislative approaches that delay the process does have a real cost, he added. "€œWhen you do that, you’re really hurting the military." Spring said that core defense programs, including research, development and acquisition, are not likely to be restored in a supplemental budget. Technology and modernization programs, therefore, suffer permanent damage, he added.
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The target --€” a Hera missile that closely mimics the characteristics of the more infamous SCUD missiles -- was launched shortly after 5:17 a.m. Wednesday. It took to the skies from a location on the far northern reaches of the bombing range's territory, about 100 miles north of the Organ Mountains, 25 miles north of Highway 380. It carried a canister of inert material to simulate chemical or biological elements that could be mounted on an enemy missile, Driessnack said. The target missile rose roughly 200 miles above the Earth before beginning the final stage descent toward land. The THAAD was launched close to the southern end, on the east side of the Organ Mountains. The object of the THAAD missile is to provide a weapon to intercept incoming missiles during the "terminal" phase, when only seconds remain before it would strike an intended target.
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Since late 2004, U.S. military missile-defense forces have been monitoring the skies, ready to move to a higher level of alert and try to shoot down any ballistic missile headed toward the U.S. "We've had the war fighters on the system for almost two years now, 24/7," Army Lieutenant General Larry Dodgen, head of the Army's space and missile defense command, told a Senate panel in April. "We have contingency capabilities that our nation can call on." It's what Pentagon officials call "a thin line of defense" that's equal parts James Bond and Rube Goldberg. There are 11 interceptors ready to launch from silos in Alaska and California, cued to their targets by arrays of satellites and shipboard sensors all linked through a Colorado command center. The Pentagon wants 48 interceptors by 2011, including 10 in Europe — the Czech Republic and Poland are likely sites — oriented toward any threat from Iran. While the system generally isn't on full alert — meaning ready to fire its interceptors — Pentagon officials said last week the system had been cranked up to monitor, and if necessary, respond to, a possible North Korean launch headed toward the U.S.
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Tokyo and Washington on Friday also signed an agreement to expand their cooperation on a joint ballistic missile defense shield, committing themselves to joint production of interceptor missiles.
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"We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons," Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., said in a quickly called press conference late Wednesday afternoon.
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