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

To: American Spirit who wrote (166893)	4/7/2003 7:45:02 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1580174

Bush Sr. cut defense plenty after the Gulf War. As he should have and needed to. We had a huge debt to pay off and tons of old Cold War programs which weren't useful anymore. That process continued into Clinton's years. The late cold war items where not very different then what we were using now. They form the base on which we have added some new capabilities. A lot of what was cut was still potentially useful but wasn't important enough to justify continuing to pay a lot of money for it. I agree cuts made sense. Bush Sr. started the cuts (strictly speaking the inflation adjusted spending declined slightly even at the very end of the Reagan administration). And after all those big cuts, Clinton continued some of them a bit further then he should have. Even he apparently realized this as he agreed to increase spending a little bit before he left office. To get to the point I don't think Clinton gutted the military, but he did cut it a bit too much for comfort. Since then the spending has been restored and then some. Our military is still smaller and there are some potential situations where that could cause a problem but we can't afford to keep enough military forces active so that we could quickly establish dominance over all possible enemies attacking simultaneously. My negative statements about Clinton in this regard have been very mild. He just went a bit to far. I wasn't going around saying he destroyed the military or made it ineffective. Some of his cuts had to be reversed later but he didn't create any crisis. Tim