I was at Anytime Fitness this morning and as always the wall-mounted flat screen TVs were set to Fox “News,” which is busy trying to conflate Secretary of Defense Hagel’s proposed military budget with total disarmament and the end of American military superiority. Army to be reduced to pre-WWII troop levels! An entire class of attack planes to be scrapped! Obama doesn’t support the troops!
Actually, the Pentagon is trying to comply with sequester budget caps imposed by Congress, and in fact Hagel’s asking for more than that. Under the sequester, the total defense budget was supposed to be cut by $31 billion in 2014, with another $45 billion cut in 2015. The military is actually asking for $496 billion for FY2015, almost exactly the same level of spending as the FY2014 budget it’s working under now. And you can be assured it will fight future programmed cuts under the sequester. So in fact, the military budget is not going down but rather staying about the same.
Army to be reduced to pre-WWII troop levels! Just to show you how sensationalistic and misleading this claim is, the Army had more than 8 million men and women in uniform during WWII. Before the war, in 1940, that number was 269,023. Since the start of the “global war on terror” and our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Army troop strength has varied between 480,801 (in 2001) and 565,463 (in 2011).
The US Army today employs 520,000 troops and had been planning, even before yesterday’s budget proposal, to cut those numbers down to 490,000 in FY2015. The new budget proposes cutting back to 450,000 troops, 40,000 fewer than previously planned. Since we are no longer in Iraq, and will be withdrawing from Afghanistan later this year, the reduction is not all that alarming. In 1999, by comparison, Army strength was less than 480,000, so in fact 450,000 sounds about right. Many would argue peacetime Army troop levels should be half that … cut back to real pre-WWII levels.
An entire class of attack planes to be scrapped! Um, we’re talking about one airplane, the A-10. The USAF currently operates around 300 A-10s. Prior plans called for the A-10 fleet to be retired and replaced by the F-35 by 2028. The budget proposal moves this up to 2020, and Secretary of Defense Hagel says this’ll free up 3.5 billion dollars for the F-35 program. The A-10 has many defenders, and arguably the F-35 will not be as capable in the close air support mission as the Warthog, but I personally don’t see how this train can be stopped without also stopping the sequester.
Obama doesn’t support the troops! That’s Dick Cheney, who yesterday declared that Obama would “rather spend the money on food stamps than he would on a strong military or support for our troops.” Excuse me, it’s not Obama, it’s the sequester, and that came from Republicans in Congress, not the White House. The very same Republicans who are now lining up behind Dick Cheney to take cheap shots at the President for military cuts they themselves imposed.
In any case, supporting the troops is largely what the proposed cuts are about, since the intent is to free up money for pay, medical care, and retirement. What Republicans … and especially Dick “Halliburton” Cheney … mean when they say “support the troops” is “support the defense contractors.”
Our media is spamming us with alarmist sensationalism. Military budget cuts have already been mandated by Congress; the military is fighting for a larger pot of money than it’s actually supposed to get under the sequester; troop strength is staying at adequate levels; the USAF is trading one airplane for another; Dick Cheney is full of crap.
Speaking of spam, here’s an email I quit reading after the very first line, when I noticed the “patriot” who sent it forgot to capitalize America:
Sensationalistic news and bot-generated spam. It’s all bullshit. But I repeat myself.