Monday, February 15, 2010

America’s Dying Military


I grew up in the most powerful and consequently the safest country in the world. Today I wonder if it is still the same country. Are we still powerfully safe?

By de Andréa

According to naval expert Seth Cropsey, the United States Navy for example, hasn't been as small as it is today since the administration of William Howard Taft. This dire development leaves the U.S. extremely vulnerable. A growing Chinese fleet could keep the declining U.S. Navy out of the Western Pacific. The U.S. also could be faced with new military challenges around the globe because of the projection of power a growing Chinese navy would present. Yet, the U.S. Navy has cut back the number and type of ships to the level it was prior to the Reagan administration. Indeed, the Navy hasn't been as small since the administration of William Howard Taft, according to naval expert Seth Cropsey.

The dire development leaves the U.S. vulnerable to "proliferation, resource scarcity, environmental change, the emergence of new international power centers including non-state actors, significant changes in relative U.S. power, failed states and demographic change … (in) an increasingly unstable future and a challenging international strategic environment," Cropsey said.

Cropsey, who served during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations as a principal deputy under the secretary of the Navy, said the U.S. Navy is "in distress."
He said the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have "sucked the oxygen" out of any effort to understand the connection between the large changes strategic planners see in the future or the ability to wield global influence through U.S. naval power.

"The size, shape and strategy of the U.S. Navy are a critical element of America's position as the world's great power," Cropsey said. "Our ability to protect or rend asunder the globe's ocean-going lines of communication is inseparable from our position as the world's great power. "But very few outside a small community of naval officers and selected military and foreign policy analysts appreciate the strategic results of American sea power's slow but steady diminution," he added.

Globally, Cropsey said, the U.S. Navy's continued attrition also means a serious threat to the security of the world's sea lines of communication and the choke points such as the Straits of Hormuz near Iran through which some 40 percent of the world's energy and other trade pass. "The consequences of a much-diminished U.S. fleet are complemented by the American public's ignorance of them, the slow yet steady pace of naval deterioration, and the increasing time and dismayingly large resources needed to recoup sea power surrendered slowly over decades," Cropsey said.

The gradual decline in the U.S. Navy comes hardly as a surprise to Congress. Last May, Adm. Gary Roughhead, chief of naval operations, told the House Armed Services Committee the Navy was stretched in its ability to modernize and "procure the Navy for tomorrow.” He said the Navy would reduce its carrier fleet from 12 to 9 for at least three years, which would increase the interval between a departing carrier and its replacement's arrival "along with the associated risk of absence during a crisis."

A separate Congressional Research Service report by naval analyst Ronald O'Rourke told Congress that China has built or is in the process of building four new classes of nuclear and conventional-powered attack and ballistic-missile submarines.

Is China as big a threat as Islam
A secret intelligence report warns a number of Western nations soon could be caught up in a new "cold war" brewing between China and the United States. The dispute apparently was sparked by a Washington decision to arm Taiwan with $6.4 billion of state-of-the art weapons systems. The deal includes 60 Black Hawk helicopters, 114 Patriot anti-missile missiles, and 12 Harpoon missiles.

Now the impact could be felt in Britain as well as Germany, France and other European nations that have substantial trading relationships with China.

For the U.K., the slowest nation to recover from global recession, any threat to its business relations with China could be devastating.

The threat is contained in a highly confidential report about the U.S. sale to Taiwan and Washington's criticism of China's position on Tibet, climate change, Internet freedom, and human rights that has poisoned relationships between the Obama administration and Beijing.

The collective views of global industrialists, internationalists, economists, and heads of companies who trade with China have been analyzed by Britain’s MI6 strategists for the intelligence service's political chief, Foreign Secretary David Milliband.

Sources close to Milliband say he is alarmed that the Chinese leadership could use the arms sale to Taiwan as a reason to sell a range of its latest weapons to Syria and Iran to kick-start the trading cold war. Both those countries already present strategic problems for America, Britain, and other nations that trade with China. "Certainly Britain would strongly object to China arming either country," said a Foreign Office source in London.

One of the Beijing leaders, Liu Menxiong, last week insisted, "If Washington can arm Taiwan we should trade what we like and with whom we wish. The North Koreans have stood up to America and nothing has happened to them. And Iran is doing the same. We will support them against America"

THE BOTTOM LINE: In the face of an ever growing foreign threat, the last several U.S. administrations have allowed our military to atrophy. This is after all one of the only promises that Obama made in his campaign speeches that he has kept. He said that he would reduce U.S. nuclear capability, and shrink the U.S. military. Obama has done more toward this goal in one year than any president has in their entire term, at the same time encouraging our enemy Iran to develop Nuclear weapons.

Connect the dots my friend…

de Andréa

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