U.S. Army Pfc. Travis McGehee, right foreground, provides security as his fellow soldiers walk up a mountain trail during a patrol with Afghan soldiers in Afghanistan's Paktia province, Oct. 21, 2013. McGehee, an infantryman, is assigned to the 101st Airborne Division's 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment , 4th Brigade Combat Team. U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Todd A. Christopherson
The Slow Death of American Defense -- Robert Kaplan, Real Clear World/Startfor
The bottom may be starting to fall out of the U.S. defense budget. I do not refer to numbers when I say this. I am not interested in numbers. I am only interested in public support for those numbers.
For decades since Pearl Harbor, the American public has firmly and quietly acquiesced to a robust military presence around the globe in defense of freedom. The Japanese attack on the U.S. Navy in Hawaii in 1941 shocked the public into the immediate need to defeat the Axis powers. Then the Cold War reigned for 44 years following World War II -- ignited in the public mind by the Korean War. Because Communism represented such a demonstrable ideological and geopolitical threat, even those who were ordinarily isolationist put aside their reservations and henceforth became committed to a big army, a big navy, and a big air force. True, after the Cold War there was an urge towards reduced defense budgets, manifested during the Clinton presidency. But 9/11 revealed that as but a brief interlude. The defense budget thus skyrocketed during the younger Bush administration.
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My Comment: Robert Kaplan's analysis is spot on. The American public is tired of war .... and the U.S. military is becoming a casualty of this "isolationist" mindset.
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