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Gates Proposes Deep Spending Cuts In Defense Budget
Secretary of Defense Gates is finally ready to announce his plans for the defense budget to president Obama and it’s sure to ruffle feathers on both sides of the aisle.
Among other things, Gates will recommend a halt to production of the F-22 fighter jet at 187 aircraft. Meanwhile he wants to speed-up production of the F-35 fighter jet which will eventually total 2,443 aircraft at a total price tag of around 1 trillion dollars.
I’m usually suspect of democrat administrations trying to cut military budgets, but I trust Gates to do the right thing. I think it’s an outrage that contractors like Boeing have gotten away with stealing the government blind with absurd cost overruns. The Pentagon has been in dire need of a revised procurement process for getting new weapon systems.
I agree with Gates that too many top brass at DOD are still stuck in a cold war mentality. We don’t need a shit load of new battle tanks or other conventional land based war machines.
Conventional warfare involving tank battles with uniformed armies are largely a thing of the past. We must always be prepared for that just in case, but we need to look forward and equip ourselves to better fight unconventional guerrilla conflicts.
Low Intensity conflicts in the Middle East and Africa is what the U.S. will be involved with for at least the next couple of decades.
It’s absolutely critical that America maintains military superiority over the rest of the world and whatever it costs to do that we should spend. However, there is no reason to waste hundreds of billions of dollars on weapons we don’t need, weapons that don’t work, and weapons that cost 5x what contractors promised they would.
Anti-War Crowd Encouraging Obama To Dump Gates
The anti-war loons are in a fit over president-elect Obama’s likely decision to keep Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Instead, they’re pushing for him to name a more anti-war voice.
Arms control advocates and anti-war activists are ratcheting up pressure on President-elect Barack ObamaDefense Secretary Robert Gates and replace him with a more strident anti-war voice. to dump
Nominating Gates to stay, “would be a violation of the mandate for change that Obama says he represents,” said Medea Benjamin, cofounder of the anti-war group CodePink.
How can you have a Secretary of Defense that’s anti-war? Isn’t that kind of an oxymoron? Secondly, the idea that anyone would take national security advice from the code pinkos is laughable at best. Bob Gates is about as moderate as they come. He’s not anti-war, but he’s certainly not pro-war either.
The least Obama can do to assure the country that he’s not a total peacenik pushover is to keep someone competent like Gates in the Sec Def spot. All Americans with the exception of the pinkos will sleep much better at night.
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