John Podhoretz argues in his latest Commentary editor’s note that this month marked the point at which “the Obama administration at last made it clear that decline was exactly the choice it was making.”
The object of that chosen decline? American military reach.
No longer would the overarching design of the U.S. military be to give the nation the capacity to fight two wars at once. Instead, the military would be large enough to fight one and serve as a “spoiler” in a second. Over the course of a decade, the Army would be reduced in size by 16 percent. The creation of new weapons systems would be delayed. The Marine Corps would be shrunk as well, although the administration had the good sense not to say exactly by how many Marines, since the Corps is probably the branch most admired by Americans and the one that has the most active and passionate alumni.
The two-war strategy proved its value when the United States actually found itself fighting two wars in the past decade. But there’s the rub. Since Obama and others in his party despised one of those wars and were not all that supportive of the other, it might have seemed as though it would be wise to reduce the size of our forces and thereby enforce a limit on the capacity of political leaders to use those forces in the future.
So, rather than making sure the presidents who follow him have as many tools in the drawer as Bush left him, Obama is designing the military to give his successor fewer tools at a time of increasing worldwide instability.
