In two major speeches, President Obama sent strong signals this week about what he envisions for the military in a post-Sept. 11 era, a new path which can be described in a word: downsized.
Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP
President Barack Obama congratulates a graduate as another one celebrates at
the United States Naval Academy graduation ceremony in Annapolis, Md., Friday,
May 24, 2013.
Just as the government’s mission is changing, so is that of the U.S. military.
Both are shrinking in scale.
During Obama’s four and a half years in White House, military spending has declined and the military active duty force has shrunk by about 29,000. American soldiers and Marines are no longer engaged in combat in Iraq and in Afghanistan their presence will soon dwindle to a residual force. “A perpetual war -- through drones or Special Forces or troop deployments -- will prove self-defeating,” the president said in a speech Thursday at the National Defense University in Washington.
This weekend some who died in those conflicts will be commemorated at Arlington National Cemetery and other cemeteries across the nation.
While saying that “our nation is still threatened by terrorists,” Obama contended that “we have to recognize that the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11.”
As Obama has shown by his aversion to any involvement in the Syrian civil war and by his tightly calibrated “lead from behind” strategy to support the overthrow of Moammar Gaddafi in Libya, he’s determined to not be the president that leads America into another traditional ground combat war.
Saying America has reached a "crossroads," President Obama laid out clearer,
more narrow guidelines for deadly drone strikes. NBC's Peter Alexander
reports.
In his speech Thursday he warned that “putting boots on the
ground” in Syria or elsewhere would lead to “more U.S. deaths, more Black Hawks
down… and an inevitable mission creep in support of such raids that could easily
escalate into new wars.”Obama’s risk aversion contrasts with a leading Democrat of the Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright. In 1993 Albright, then the U.S. envoy to the United Nations, urged intervention in the Balkans war, challenging the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and Vietnam War veteran) Gen. Colin Powell: ''What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?''
Obama reminds Americans of the costs of war – especially measured in the things that military outlays might have purchased -- lamenting that the dollars spent in Iraq and Afghanistan limited “our ability to nation-build here at home. “
He cautioned Thursday that “unless we discipline our thinking, our definitions, our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight….”
Yet in some ways, while some of the threats to the nation are new, the U.S. military in the Obama era remains much as it was in the Bush or Clinton eras. In an era of lone-wolf terrorists and suicidal jihadists, the United States is still equipped for an old-style war against nation-states on sea or on land.
Even with the sequester cutting about 8 percent in available funds for the Pentagon this year, military outlays will amount to about 18 percent of all federal outlays.