From Fox’s Special Report with Bret Baier

Thursday, January 6, 2012

On the new US defense strategy outlined Thursday by President Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta:

This budget strategy is a roadmap of American decline.
It’s going to reduce our [military] capacity, as it does exactly what the president had said he was not going to do today, which is it will adapt our strategy and our capacities to fit a budget. And remember this is a budget without any cuts in entitlements, which is essentially what is killing us [financially] and adding to our deficit — but instead he [the president] takes it out of defense.
Yes, it says we don’t want to have new large ground wars. Well, I agree. That is fine. But sometimes a Pearl Harbor happens or invasion of South Korea or a 9/11 and then a ground war is thrust upon you. It isn’t as if it’s a choice.
So the strategy is to reduce the ground forces, increase Navy and Air Force. And yet [there are] huge cuts in the joint strike fighter, which is the new fighter of this new century.
This is a budget that is going to reduce the American [military] capacity. It will make it extremely hard to carry the role that we have for the last 70 years.
So it [defense spending] grows in nominal dollars — which is meaningless. It shrinks as a percentage of our economy. Under John Kennedy, whom I don’t remember liberals ever attacking as a man who overspent on defense, half of the federal budget was on defense. Today it’s a fifth. Under Kennedy, we spent 9.5 percent of our economy on the military. Today it’s headed to four percent and shrinking. As a percentage of our economy it’s going to get a lot smaller.