NATO ALLIES:
"Key to our approach is being able to deter our most advanced competitors," he said. "We must have - and be seen to have - the ability to impose unacceptable costs on an advanced aggressor that will either dissuade them from taking provocative action or make them deeply regret it if they do."
Update: Better late than never? Maybe. My bolding.
A ramp-up of this suddenly large proportion is an implicit admission of neglect. It’s a move to catch up. And it’s reminiscent of Jimmy Carter’s late-in-his-term increase in defense spending after years of soporific inaction.
For one thing, the U.S. is late in reacting to events. Not only has Russia’s military modernization and buildup been ignored, but last Dec. 31, Russia abruptly changed its 2009 military doctrine to declare the U.S. a leading threat to its interests, mocking the U.S. as “striving to retain its dominance in global and military affairs.”
Military leaders, such as outgoing Gen. Ray Odierno last year, have warned that the main threats the U.S. faced were Russia, China, North Korea and the Islamic State, but they were not obviously heeded by the White House.
The White House in fact was creating this strategic situation by focusing on global warming as America’s top threat and engaging in various social engineering projects such as women in combat and integrating transsexuals into the troop ranks, even as some generals warned that they could hurt troop readiness.
He got rid of important defense programs such as the Tomahawk cruise missile and, for a time, the A10 Warthog fighter jet, and dismissed Russia itself as an unimportant “regional power” in March 2014, an undiplomatic remark that reportedly rankled President Vladimir Putin.
Not only did it annoy the Russian autocrat and motivate him to show America otherwise, Putin’s other transgressions — threats to Finland, Sweden, Estonia and even California, as well as two actual military invasions of sovereign states, Georgia and Ukraine — went largely ignored and ineffectively sanctioned. Why? National Security Council official Ben Rhodes pretty well revealed that in a December 24 interview with Tass, stating that securing Russia’s cooperation on the Iran Deal over seven years was the Obama administration’s most important accomplishment.
President Obama was anything but far-sighted about America’s strategic interests, too. When oil prices were high and Russia was reaping big earnings for military upgrades from it, President Obama did all he could to halt energy initiatives that would have checked Russia’s cash bonanza, throwing regulatory roadblocks at fracking and coal initiatives and halting a major pipeline from Canada, all of which combined would have cut energy prices.
It all adds up to a legacy of neglect and disengagement, one that is being only remedied by pressure from the Pentagon. It need never have come to a reactive situation. But it has. And while defense is good, it’s hard to not see this as a panicky reaction to a long-festering failure of policy.