Looking Forward

One of the reasons we commemorate significant events of tragedy from the past is to reinforce new behavior that will help such tragedy from happening again in the future.  With that in mind, let's look at just a few things surrounding the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and how we're moving forward, specifically in regard to military readiness:

It is no big secret in the military. The force is worn down to nubs by a decade of war, the last two of which have been waged under the management of an administration fundamentally hostile to the Armed Services.

The fact is Obama is only comfortable cutting one sector of the budget: Defense. This is not to say that Defense is without waste, fraud, and abuse but it isn’t destroying jobs and the economy like Health and Human Services, EPA, and Labor. Right now cuts in defense are projected to total a half trillion dollars. Under Secretary Gates $178 billion, earmarked to support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, was given up to support budget reductions.

Chairman Buck McKeon is going to hold a series of hearings over the next three weeks, around the anniversary of 9/11. Tomorrow the theme will be The Future of National Defense and the U.S. Military Ten Years After 9/11.

No part of the budget should be sacrosanct but neither should we send young men and women in to combat without the best equipment and support the nation can offer.

These people are the ones defending our freedom and prosperity.  It is a source of unending national shame to patriotic Americans that our armed forces are being whittled away by our elected leaders.  Not only is this a sign of extreme ungratefulness to the sacrifices of these good men and women (and their families), but it is also the height of foolishness because the foreign threats and dangers to America are growing by the day.

Unfortunately, so are the domestic ones, whether by the fundamental transformation of American society into a European socialist state, the systematic takeover of the American economy by an insatiable and corrupt government bureaucracy, or by the rejection of American exceptionalism.  It is a sad commentary that we must be vigilant against not only the threats from outside our borders, but also from our very own leaders.