The Obama Administration’s dangerous experiment to determine whether aggressive states such as Russia, China, Iran and North Korea would respond positively to a diminished U.S. military and a reduced worldwide presence has been a failure.
Russia and China have engaged in a vast, dramatic arms buildup of both their conventional and strategic nuclear forces. Both have developed aggressive postures, including invasions of neighboring nations (Russia in Ukraine, China in the offshore exclusive economic zone of the Philippines.) North Korea has accelerated its nuclear program, and Iran continues to advance its armed forces and supported terrorist activities. Non-state actors, such as ISIS, have risen to previously unimagined strength.
While all this has been occurring, the Obama Administration has refused to change its deeply flawed and risky course. The American military, already sharply reduced from its 1990 Cold War levels, has been forced to further shrink and deteriorate. The proposed 2016 defense budget is smaller than its 2009 counterpart, when Mr. Obama first took office, and will result in further cuts.
The National Interest notes that “The announcement that the U.S. Army is to lose 40,000 troops and 17,000 civilian employees by 2017 has taken some by surprise. Although it has long been known that the Obama administration was to pursue reductions in the size of the military in line with sequestration, the timing by which those economies are to take place is causing some controversy—especially in light of ongoing events in the Middle East and Europe…they are yet more evidence of a macro-level acceptance by America’s political elite that the country’s global supremacy should be allowed to dwindle—particularly in military terms. By countenancing the strictures of sequestration instead of trying to find a bipartisan escape from mandated cuts, the U.S. political class has effectively acquiesced in a winnowing away of the country’s military supremacy, come rain or shine…
“ Under current spending plans, projections are that the Army will drop to around 420,000 active troops—a size that military planners warn would jeopardize the military’s ability to effectively deploy to multiple war zones at any one time. Not only would this number be a far cry from the circa 566,000 troop–level seen at the height of Iraq and Afghanistan, but it would double-down on the Pentagon’s previous repudiation of a decades-old mantra that the United States ought to be able to fight multiple land wars simultaneously. Under President Kennedy, the military was supposed to be capable of waging two-and-a-half full-scale wars at one time. In the 1980s, Casper Weinberger even articulated plans for a three-and-a-half war strategy. But in 2010, Robert Gates announced that the United States would no longer even prepare to fight two wars simultaneously, preferring instead to organize itself for nontraditional threats like cybersecurity and terrorism.
In a review on the state of the U.S. military, the American Enterprise Institute notes:
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“The combat Air Force is too small to ensure American air superiority. [It is] is stuck with 20th-century aircraft.
The Navy is too small to maintain presence in the Pacific, Persian Gulf, and Mediterranean…[It] cannot keep up with missile defense demand…The US Navy has a “carrier gap” in the Western Pacific…it is an 11 carrier navy in a 15 carrier world.”
“Since 2011, the Army has cancelled 21 programs, delayed 125 and restructured 124 . . . [as] procurement funding dropped from $21.3 billion to $13.5 billion. The Army is not ready to respond to large crises. Readiness has been degraded to its lowest level in 20 years. . . . Today we only have 33% of our brigades ready to the extent we would expect them to be if asked to fight.”
“American power has slowly but surely atrophied relative to the burgeoning threats that confront the United States. Seemingly attractive short-term defense cuts carried long-term costs, not only in monetary terms, but also in proliferating risk to American national interests. Military spending has fallen since 1991 by every metric—as a percentage of GDP, as a percentage of the federal budget, and in real terms—even as a declining share of the Pentagon budget funds combat-related activities.”
The diminished American military now faces the most formidable threat in U.S. history, as the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian militaries train together and share, in many cases, common goals.