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- iHaveNet.com: Politics
by Kori Schake
Further cuts to defense spending probably are necessary, both politically and arithmetically, to make substantial progress toward eliminating deficit spending and reducing our federal debt.
Our indebtedness is the greatest national security vulnerability America has, and we can afford to accept greater risk in the short-term (the coming several years) in order to put our country on solid financial footing.
Our military is the world's finest by a substantial margin.
While a relatively small force, it is battle-hardened, amazingly innovative, and has top-of-the-line equipment. At least in the short term, we have information dominance, air supremacy, mastery of the spectrum of operations from counterinsurgency to the highest intensity operations. Defense spending has doubled in the past decade. Our margin for error is very wide.
Defense has already been cut significantly. Two years ago, Secretary Gates worked with Service Chiefs to identify
Where the defense leadership gets concerned is about the automatic cuts of another
The American military is the envy of the world, and well it should be.
Cuts to defense will make the work of our military harder, and political leaders need to accept responsibility for incurring those risks. But the risk of continuing our lurch toward insolvency is even more damaging to our country. We just need to ensure that as we make cuts, we are not asking only the military to fix this enormous problem.
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Deficit Is Greatest Security Threat | Politics
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