By Jed Babbin
If you're wondering where to find the strategic thinking behind Obama's slashing of the military budget, you won't find it in Clausewitz, Kissinger, or David Galula. After days of searching, I think I found it lying at some unequal distance between the Beatles' "Helter Skelter" and the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter."
Obama's plan to slash $487 billion in Pentagon spending over ten years comes sandwiched between the $400 billion in cuts he made using Robert Gates as his knife and the possible sequestration of another $600 billion in cuts under last year's random results from the failed "supercommittee."
Congress and the pundit community have fallen into the political trap that these cuts pose. They are attacking the cuts by defending the constituencies -- individual military assets they favor, contractors in their states -- and losing the battle. They are losing because they don't argue against the underlying theories of the so-called "plans," none of which match the others.
Read more: http://spectator.org/archives/2012/01/30/obamas-helter-skelter-strategy
If you're wondering where to find the strategic thinking behind Obama's slashing of the military budget, you won't find it in Clausewitz, Kissinger, or David Galula. After days of searching, I think I found it lying at some unequal distance between the Beatles' "Helter Skelter" and the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter."
Obama's plan to slash $487 billion in Pentagon spending over ten years comes sandwiched between the $400 billion in cuts he made using Robert Gates as his knife and the possible sequestration of another $600 billion in cuts under last year's random results from the failed "supercommittee."
Congress and the pundit community have fallen into the political trap that these cuts pose. They are attacking the cuts by defending the constituencies -- individual military assets they favor, contractors in their states -- and losing the battle. They are losing because they don't argue against the underlying theories of the so-called "plans," none of which match the others.
Read more: http://spectator.org/archives/2012/01/30/obamas-helter-skelter-strategy
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