(Military Times) Op-Ed: Erasing Red Ink

[unhappycamper]

Erasing Red Ink
Ivan Eland | March 03, 2009

A front page article in The New York Times starts out with the sentence: "The budget that President Obama proposed on Thursday is nothing less than an attempt to end a three-decade era of economic policy dominated by the ideas of Ronald Reagan and his supporters." Not so much.

~snip~

Obama has proposed withdrawing all combat forces from Iraq by August of 2010, but this only seems to save about $14 billion because he is leaving them in Iraq three months longer than his campaign promise of a 16-month withdrawal, is retaining as many as 50,000 troops in that country and simply re-labeling them into "non-combat" roles, and is simultaneously escalating the war in Afghanistan. He should withdrawal from Iraq faster and abandon the nation-building quagmire in Afghanistan, which is only inflaming anti-U.S. Islamism in Southwest Asia and the rest of the world.

Even more boldly, Obama should realize that with the economic meltdown, we can no longer afford the expansive U.S. overseas empire. By withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan and vowing to end imperial policing and nation-building, he could scrap the expensive plan to increase the Army and Marine Corps by 92,000 troops. Personnel costs already make up two-thirds of the Pentagon's budget and adding people is expensive.

In addition, Obama should make each of the services cancel major unneeded or excessively expensive weapons systems. Here are some suggestions: The Air Force's tanker and F-22, the Navy's Littoral Combat Ship, the Marine Corps' V-22, the Army's Future Combat System (a fleet of fighting vehicles needed for fighting a future great power rival, which doesn't exist), and the Joint Strike Fighter.

Although Obama's promise to eventually cut the deficits seems problematic with all of the added stimulus and other spending, surprisingly most modern day Democratic presidents have been better at cutting deficits and government spending as a portion of GDP than Republicans, who usually increase government spending as a portion of GDP, thus rendering their perennial tax cuts to be fake. Because Obama has a tough row to hoe to equal his Democratic compatriots Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton at deficit reduction, he needs to start with big cuts in the defense budget.

Rest of article at: http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,186177,00.html?wh=news