Obama Plan Is "Incredibly Risky" - America's Military Strength And Credibility Are At Stake. After two years of sequester cuts, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) have finally turned on the Obama administration. They told the Senate Armed Services Committee this week they have major problems with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel's plan, the Strategic Choices and Management Review. The SCMR (or "scammer"), they said, makes dangerously optimistic assumptions about how big the next war will be, how long it will take to win, how big a force we need to win it, and how quickly that force can be made ready to fight. • The Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Ray Odierno, says it makes rosy and dangerous assumptions, and it is wrong to believe America will quickly prevail with minimal casualties, quickly pull out, and there will be no prolonged and messy clean-up afterwards. • As an example, Odinerno said “That a war in Korea would last less than a year, there’s nothing that makes me feel that’s a good assumption.” He also said it is wrong to assume the enemy won’t use weapons of mass destruction. • With the scammer, he says we have made "assumptions that we could magically build this huge army in a very short period of time.” • Even bringing back the draft doesn’t solve the problem, he said: “Even then it would take longer than six months to a year; it would probably still take two years plus to build an army. It’s assumptions like that which are incredibly risky.” • The Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Jonathan Greenert, said the military has never been able to do what the scammer is calling for. He said "We’ve never been able to predict the future, and it’s kind of dangerous if you’re wrong.” • Gen. Mark Welsh, the Air Force Chief of Staff, says the scammer assumes we are ready, and “We’re clearly not there today.” He said sequestration has already reduced the military’s readiness. • “This is the lowest readiness level I’ve seen within our army since I’ve been serving, for the last 37 years,” Gen. Odierno told the senators. • Gen. James Amos, the commandant of the Marine Corps, said “We are headed towards a force in not too many years that will be hollow back home and not ready to deploy. They will not be trained, equipped, and ready to go to war. If they do deploy in harm’s way, we’ll end up with more casualties.” • Under full sequestration, Amos said the Marine Corps will lose one of its three combat divisions. • The Vice-Chairman of the Joint Staff, Adm. James Winnefeld, said former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld thought we would have a swift victory in Iraq through “shock and awe,” but it didn't happen and we should expect that in the future. • Odinero said “It may be popular to proclaim we are entering a new age where land wars are obsolete, yet history is rife with wars that leaders knew would never be fought." • The JCS members emphasized that for every dollar sequestration saves today, it will cost two or three times as much to recover when the nation asks.
