Arthur Herman column in NYPost via James Riley.
Per my "Awakening of Robert Gates" piece in Esquire earlier this year, you start to see the right going after Gates obliquely while trying to keep the bulk of the blame on Obama (Obama is purposefully condemning America to losing its superpower status and Gates is letting him do it).
Everyone and his brother has long predicted the end of the post-9/11 defense "gusher" that saw plenty of spending for both the Leviathan and SysAdmin sides of the house, meaning we kept buying the Big War platforms and used the small wars force like crazy in Iraq and Afghanistan. So long as Bush-Cheney set no spending limits, all was fine.
Then the financial crisis hits, Obama does his stimulus/bail-out spending there, and we're back, to no one's surprise, talking most about debts and deficits and reining in spending.
So Gates goes around telling the military, like in the recent "Ike" Kansas speech, that the same old approach to force structure (same big platforms, just more pimped out and supremely costlier) cannot continue, and too many in the audience sit there, mouths agape, wondering what hit them.
What this signals? The Committee on the Present Danger is reforming and will seek to paint Obama as the second coming of Jimmy Carter. I don't think this is a bad thing, per se, and I truly believe Obama needs to offer a strong defense against the charge. But what comes next, in terms of a progressive revitalization of the military post-Iraq, cannot be some mindless return to the Leviathan force structure of the past.
So we need more than brain-dead whining like this.