This line fails to acknowledge that war is a come-as-you-are affair. The United States faced the dangerous post-9/11 world with the armed forces and defense industrial base it had left following the 1990s, when many of today’s defeatists cashed in yesterday’s so-called “peace dividend.” It takes a relatively short time to dismantle large parts of our military’s power-projection capabilities and infrastructure, and decades to reconstitute them.
Dangerous, short-sighted and historically ignorant are all apt descriptions of a policy that fails to invest in the U.S. military in peacetime. But failing to invest sufficiently in our defense capabilities in time of war is reckless in the extreme. At some point, such behavior breeds not just defeatism. It assures defeat.
Today, the U.S. Army’s soaring personnel costs leave it with insufficient resources both to support our combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and to maintain the readiness of units not presently in the fight. Even worse are shortfalls in the procurement of equipment needed to conduct tomorrow’s, possibly quite different wars.
The Navy’s shipbuilding program is on a trajectory that is wholly inadequate to assure freedom of the seas, on which not only our security but our economic well-being critically depends. The same is true of the modernization program for the Coast Guard, an institution whose duties vastly exceed its capabilities. If anything, this mismatch will become more grievous with the proliferation of seaborne threats to this country.
The Marine Corps is facing its own serious resource, investment and manpower challenges. One symptom of its condition was last week’s announcement that the service must recall some long-serving members of its Individual Ready Reserve to active duty.
The Air Force has just seen its contractors begin shutting down the Free World’s only production line for highly capable, heavy-lift transport aircraft, the C-17. This plane is an indispensable part of America’s ability to project power. The planned inventory is insufficient to assure that we will be able to do so where and when we will need to in the future.
American voters are badly served by leaders who suggest that national security can be achieved on the cheap, especially in time of war. The reality is that abandoning Iraq will not save either lives or dollars in the long-run. Such a course will intensify the danger posed to our country and way of life from Islamofascists, their sponsors and friends.
The public must be told the truth. This war is not just about Iraq and will not be over if we retreat from the conflict there. It will likely get worse before it gets better. It will require greater sacrifice – indeed, a national mobilization – if we are to prevail. Those who suggest that the alternative is less painful and costly are at best disingenuous.
In fact, history tells us that confronting foes like ours later, rather than now, under circumstances of their choosing rather than ours, will entail a far higher price in lives and national treasure. Informed voters, given the choice, will reject the lemming-leap of defeatism and its inevitable high toll.