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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alighieri who wrote (155495)	12/2/2002 9:43:08 AM
From: i-node	Respond to of 1578704

1. I think I remember YOU saying that the military had been neglected by Clinton. I know Bush made a campaign issue of it. That's correct. I repeat: It is difficult for me to imagine that in eight short years our military has been depleted to the extent that we can't manage, with perfection, Iraq AND Afghanistan. WHEN CLINTON TOOK OFFICE OUR MILITARY WAS CAPABLE OF CONDUCTING TO MAJOR THEATER WARS SIMULTANEOUSLY WHILE MANAGING NUMEROUS SMALLER CONFLICTS. 2. Just spend a few minutes watching Fox...I would be surprised if you did not hear at least one (Ret) military "analyst" say that the military is much stronger today than it was in 1991. I have FOX on all day every day. I won't say I "haven't heard it", but I do not recall it. Who do you think made the statement? 3. Liberals feel that we should not attack Iraq because it is bad policy in so many ways that wether the military is up to it is secondary to the issue. Okay, I can understand this. If this is the case, they should be honest about it instead of making excuses like, "our military can't handle it". We can argue about whether it is bad policy; to me, bad policy would be to allow Iraq to acquire additional WMD (like Clinton did in N Korea), at which point the task of keeping the dictator in check becomes much more difficult. But we can differ; you may feel we're better off hoping he doesn't get nukes...

To: Alighieri who wrote (155495)	12/2/2002 12:26:51 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578704

2. Just spend a few minutes watching Fox...I would be surprised if you did not hear at least one (Ret) military "analyst" say that the military is much stronger today than it was in 1991. Its more advanced. It has new capabilities that it didn't have before, but more importantly a lot of the new capabilities that existed in 1991 have now spread throughout the force. In 1991 a small fraction of our bomb inventory was "smart bombs", now most of the ordinance that we drop from aircraft is guided in some way. The way the military is not as good as it was in 1991 is that it doesn't have the same level or excess forces for unforeseen contingencies and parts of it have less readiness then we did in the late 80s or early 90s. Our forces are smaller. Against the Taliban, or even Iraq it shouldn't be enough to be an issue, but in a major war, or if we were trying two or three Iraq sized problems at the same time (imagine North Korea invading the South while we are involved in Iraq and in Afghanistan) then we might have a problem. The problem could be overcome but only at the cost of higher casualties in the US military and probably among civilians in the war zone as well. In addition to being smaller the military is less able to deal with future budget cuts then it was in the 90s. One of the reasons that their could be such big cut backs in the 90s without gutting our military was all the new weapons that where bought in the 80s. Another was the spending authorized in the 80s that continued in to the 90s. Now weapons bought in the 80s, while still serviceable (some are of excelent quality) are no longer new, and we don't have a backlog of budget authority from the 90s to spend on programs in this new century. Tim