Among the many lowlights of Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign was his retort to Mitt Romney’s claim that Russia was re-emerging as America’s foremost geopolitical rival. Who can forget his debate quip, “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.”
https://youtube.com/watch?v=QS2a44F5TgM
Well, it looks like the 1980s are indeed calling, and they want their American military back. The facts about Russian aggression are now well-known, but less well-known is the cost of President Obama’s drawdown of the American military. Last Friday, The Daily Beast reported on Pentagon fears that the military is not prepared for a “sustained fight” with Russia:
A series of classified exercises over the summer has raised concerns inside the Defense Department that its forces are not prepared for a sustained military campaign against Russia, two defense officials told The Daily Beast.
Many within the military believe that 15 years of counter terrorism warfare has left the ground troops ill prepared to maintain logistics or troops levels should Russia make an advance on NATO allies, the officials said.
Among the challenges the exercises revealed were that the number of precision-guided munitions available across the force were short of the war plans and it would be difficult to sustain a large troop presence.
Pentagon officials believe that American forces would still triumph, but it would take “everything we had” to defeat a Russian military stocked with aging equipment. As one official said, “[D]irect conflict with Russia is a low probability, high-risk situation. The challenge of Putin’s erratic leadership is that low probability events are slightly more probable.” Read the entire article for the gory details, but note this comment — and the timeline — from retired Lieutenant General Mark Hertling (full disclosure, I served under then-Major General Hertling in Iraq):
But Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, who retired in 2012 as the commander of U.S. Army Europe, said that the Russian threat existed far before the latest budget squabbles. And when he raised them in 2010, they fell on deaf ears.
“We were beating the drum of Russia in 2010 and we were told [by Washington officials], ‘You are still in the Cold War.’ All the things we predicted would happen, happened, but it wasn’t at the forefront of the time,” Hertling said.
Two years before the presidential debates, senior military officials were warning Washington about Russia’s intentions. The Obama administration’s response was to road-test its election talking points and then cut the Army by 80,000 more troops — projecting weakness and mocking dissent, the very foundations of the Obama Doctrine.