President Obama came into office believing that the United States should immediately withdraw from Iraq, talk our way into victory in Afghanistan, and close Guantanamo Bay. He also thought he could borrow money and spend our way into prosperity, but that is another subject. All of these goals were incredibly naïve. But Obama had so little experience that he literally believed he would speak and everyone would think, “Oh, now I understand.” This would result in a prosperous economy, world peace, the end of terrorism and salvation from global warming. Unfortunately, he made some important decisions based on this naïve world view that are now doing grave harm to our national security.
Prior to Obama, every recent U.S. President asked one question immediately whenever there was a trouble spot anywhere in the world: “where are my carriers?” Obama does not ask that because he knows where these carriers are located. They are in port waiting for repairs he has not funded.
http://www.defensestudies.org/cds/where-are-our-carriers-increasingly-at-home/
It was bad enough that Obama spent most of his first year in office traveling the globe apologizing for our excessive use of force by other, less brilliant, Presidents. But in addition to that, his actions have decimated our military to the extent that we couldn’t respond even if he did accidentally wake up with a backbone.
http://oldnfo.blogspot.com/2011/03/where-are-our-carriers.html
In my personal opinion, which is very similar to that of the oath of office taken by the President of the United States, the primary duty of a President is to preserve, protect and defend this country. Obama probably believes that as well, but he apparently does not feel that having a seven-ocean navy is essential to our defense. Obama thought he was a uniquely gifted person who truly understood the world. He thought all of the world’s problems would be solved by merely putting someone with his great intellect in charge. He was the one we’ve been waiting for. He viewed our military strength as an inconvenient burden. In April, 2010, Obama said this in a speech:
“It is a vital national security interest of the United States to reduce these conflicts because whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower, and when conflicts break out, one way or another we get pulled into them,” Obama said.
Now we are facing problems over the world and the question is no longer whether or not we should flex our military power but rather whether we have any real power available to use. Of course the main stream media will blame this on overextending ourselves in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that is somewhat true. But the primary problem is that we apparently have a President who considers having a seven-ocean navy as an unnecessary expense item.
This is not unique to Obama. Many leading Republicans were anti-military and extremely isolationist prior to World War II. There were a lot of well-intended people who naively thought reducing the size of our military would reduce the chances of getting caught up in another war. Sadly, they were very wrong. Instead, the lack of military power and quick response to people like Hitler and Mussolini resulted in World War II. History has shown us that failure to respond quickly, when dealing with these kinds of threats, just increases the ultimate cost of dealing with them later. The real issue is not how Obama is handling Egypt and Libya, but rather that now the entire world knows they can challenge us with impunity. Not only do we have a President who is incapable of providing leadership, he has decimated our military capacity to the extent that one questions whether he even could respond. In the meantime, our national security is being “carriered” away.
TDM