EDITORIAL: Defense needs must come first

Obama will fall back on the Clinton process of military control. He will budget substantial replinishment and then shift maintenance, support and R&D funding out of the budget to meet his social programs because operational committments don't require them and contingency plans are not part of the budget. He will not commit U.S. forces unilaterally toward U.S. national security interests (Clinton never did in the WTC, the Khobar Towers, the Embassies or the USS Cole bombings), he will only commit them multilaterally and not necessarily in U.S. national interests (Kosovo had nothing to do with U.S. national security). The problem is the world still looks at the U.S. as a stability factor and it takes every bit of our military budget to maintain that stability. When we internationalize, those expectations don't change, other countries interests just supercede ours and they don't provide any corresponding financial obligations to offset it. Depending on Obama's international obligations, we could end up with the same hollow military we had at the end of the Clinton administration and at the end of Obama's first term. Barney Frank has already asked for a 25% reduction in military spending without any substantiation other than the current economic crisis. The Congress is really long on asking for benchmarks and plans and really short on delivering them.

In a period where U.S. military technology is decades ahead of the rest of the world's, it makes sense to resupply our forces with, for instance, new F-16's, instead of a new generation of fighters. Creating a new attack submarine to replace the best attack submarine in the world is imprudent. Better to resupply the Army and Marines with new armored and infantry weapons. There isn't enough money to do both.

We need to double the size of the military, but rather then do this Obama and the Dems will cut it, thereby insuring more and bigger wars in the future.