DOES THE PENTAGON HAVE A REAL PLAN FOR KEEPING US SAFE?….

Posted By on February 10th, 2010

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.5472/pub_detail.asp
February 10, 2010
Exclusive: Pentagon Reports Provide Cold Comfort on Security Issues
James Carafano, PhD

Lots of trees died for a series of Pentagon reports cranked out last week. Their sacrifice may have been in vain. All these documents leave doubt that the administration has a practical plan to keep the nation free, safe, and secure in the years ahead.

The most significant of the papers cranked out by the government printing presses was the president’s budget for FY2011. The budget only foresees a modest increase of about one percent in Pentagon spending. That’s cold comfort. Heritage Foundation analysts have concluded that the defense budget is under funded by about $50 billion per year. Furthermore, projected spending after next year looks disastrous. As Heritage defense expert Baker Spring points out, the administration

“proposes to reduce the defense budget by about $92 billion from fiscal 2011 levels in fiscal 2012. This is a roughly 12 percent current dollar reduction in a single year. The overall defense budget would then see modest real growth annually for the remainder of the five-year program (through fiscal 2015), but only from the levels set by the draconian cut proposed for fiscal 2012. Defense increases following defense cuts cannot reasonably be considered increases.”

The Pentagon also released its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), a report required by law every four years to evaluate the long-term needs and strategy of the armed forces. Heritage scholar Mackenzie Eaglen concludes this report is also a big disappointment. “The QDR, Eaglen finds, “lacks long-term vision and serves largely as an analytical justification for current defense plans and programs – including the scaling back of modernization for next-generation systems.” In short, the QDR is little more than a rubber stamp for the administration’s determination to under fund defense needs.

The other major report released by the Pentagon last week proved equally disappointing. Called the Ballistic Missile Defense Review, it sketched the White House’s long-term plans to protect the U.S. and its allies from the threat of attack by nuclear-tipped missiles. The report, however, comes up way short of recommending what is needed to ensure the U.S. is not vulnerable to future threats from Iran and North Korea. “Despite Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the intelligence estimates that North Korea could reach the U.S. with a missile within the decade,” Heritage scholar Baker Spring notes. “The Pentagon plan to deploy advanced variants of the SM-3 missiles will have [only] ‘some capability to knock out long-range missile warheads’ and will not be ready until 2020.”

It would have been far more prudent for the U.S. not to cancel the planned employment of ground-based interceptors and radars in Poland and the Czech Republic. These systems could have provided a defense of all of Western Europe and the U.S. homeland far sooner.

For all these reports, for last week, the White House gets a grade of “D” for dismal.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor James Jay Carafano, Ph.D., is a leading expert in defense affaires, intelligence, military operations and strategy, and homeland security at the Heritage Foundation.

Categorized under: ANTI-SEMITISM.
Tagged with: no tags.

Comments are closed.