Trying to drive a wedge between Gates and Obama
Monday, May 24, 2010 at 12:08AM 
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.
Reader Comments (3)
more pimped-out platforms
At what point do requirements for transportability (C-130 vs C-5?), survivability (how big of an IED must the crew survive? 155mm round directly under the vehicle?), environmental considerations (heat, cold, altitude, sand, etc), turn into "pimped-out"? These are the kind of questions that frankly drove a lot of the costs on the old Future Combat Systems program. I'm not saying that program shouldn't have been canceled, I just wished I knew how to decide at what point requirements stop being 'essential'? We do a piss-poor job of understanding requirements/cost trades (I think the problem is systemic), but looking back on 30 years in the 'military-industrial complex' there are a lot of requirements that seemed to many to be 'gold plated' at the time that have proven themselves in combat, and a lot of things that looked essential at the time that have never, with 20-20 hindsight, shown much value.
It is clear the military spending needs to be cut. There must be ways we can cut and maintain the forces we need to protect our interests around the world. But the real spending problem lies with Obama's deficits and his projected deficits over the next 10 years. Bush can't be blamed for that nor can the Republicans. The 1.5 trillion dollar deficits is Obama's to live with and for us and our unborn to pay back.
We found out that if our very expensive, state of the art helicopters, could be brought down by RPG's if they were flown low in close support missions. RPG's are cheap and plentiful. They are not "Heat Seeking" nor do they use any radar "Lock On." Just simple "Point Detonating" war heads. So our defense systems (flares, electronics) were useless. Our ground vehicles continue to drive down congested streets in cities and towns and on lonely stretches of country and mountain roads. Old, rusty 155mm artillery rounds are planted in the dirt and in dead animal carcasses to blow up and injure or kill our troops.
Our enemy is fighting us with junk. This enemy is not going to be defeated by Beltway insiders or Defense Industry Engineers. We do not need a vehicle that can survive an explosion caused by ten 155mm shells wired together. What we need are better tactics. Or maybe, and I know this is heresy, maybe we should not be where they can shoot at us with RPG's and maybe we should not be driving down those damn mountain roads.