Is This A New Threat?

From "The Armed Forces Journal"

http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/stalins-successor-is-teaching/

Stalin’s successor is teaching - Americans should learn

President Obama warns that if Russia intervenes with military power to crush the new Ukrainian government in Kiev there will be a cost. Yet it’s hard to know what the U.S. president can actually do that would impress Russian President Vladimir Putin.

America’s post-Cold War surplus of military power is gone. It was squandered on occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The preoccupation with “irregular warfare,” the self-defeating interventions, and conflicts with insurgents that have no armies, no air forces, no air defenses and no naval strength — these have left the U.S. unprepared for current and future crises.

Shrinking the Army in favor of light infantry-centric, counterinsurgency-focused units has turned what’s left of the Regular Army into a large constabulary force. The failure to consolidate Army combat power through reorganization, to extract more fighting power from its remaining numbers has destroyed support for new, survivable combat platforms the Army needs. Capability depends on organization, technology and leadership, not just numbers.

In the Navy, shrinking defense dollars are diverted into amphibious carriers and service-unique jet aircraft for the Marine Corps at a point in time when slow, diesel-powered mini-aircraft carriers with minimal self-protection cannot operate in anything other than an extremely permissive environment. The Department of the Navy cannot afford two independent air forces that operate variants of the same aircraft or that field different aircraft for overlapping missions.

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