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Then I heard what must have been another joke. Dennis Kucinich actually suggested that we decrease the size of our military. In proportion to GDP and federal spending, we currently spend less on our military today by percentage than at any point in US history. Two thirds of all of our federal spending goes to pointless and over bloated programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the utter disaster that is the Department of Education. Christopher Dodd actually had the nerve to suggest cutting military programs such as the F-22 fighter jet. With the increase in Chinese military spending and now with Russia aiming its nuclear arsenal at Europe why would we even consider cutting programs that ensure US military dominance. It is imparative as a preventive measure to ensure that the US military has a technological advantage of thirty years over the other major powers (as we currently have). It is clear that we do not have enough soldiers as we need. In the first gulf war over five hundred and fifty thousand soldiers were placed on the ground as part of Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. Senator Obama has proposed an increase of one hundred thousand US soldiers; we should take it further than that and double the size of the US military.

We need to significantly increase the number of ground forces in the armed services, but the military also needs to add thousands of Special Forces units, Arabic translators, and cultural specialists. Our military needs to be bigger, not smaller, but it also needs to be smarter. One reason why the early operations in Afghanistan were so successful was because of the use of the “network” strategy. Less than one dozen four to eight man “A teams” which included a mix of CIA operatives and soldiers from different branches of the military coordinated the ground and air war against the Taliban. This network strategy enables commanders on the ground to make important decisions in real time without having to deal with heavy bureaucracy. One of the massive failures of Vietnam was the consolidation of Special Forces into SOCOM, which was a bureaucratic disaster that cost lives and money. It has been suggested that the Pentagon continue its strategy of decentralization. CENTCOM is the US military base of operations for the Middle East and its existence enables all Middle Eastern operational decisions to be made in real time, in the same time zone (CENTCOM is located in Qatar) and by military and civilian experts who specialize in the region they operate in. This is a huge step forward as it has enabled much faster and more well informed decision making than if day to day operations were run by the Pentagon thousands of miles away in Washington D.C. We should expand this strategy by sectionalizing the globe into other command centers that have access to their own air, sea, and ground assets, which would be capable of responding to situations in any part of the globe at unprecedented speed. I would recommend such networking with the State Department and the CIA and increase inter-corporation between all three on regional levels as suppose to agents, diplomats, and soldiers on the ground having to speak through professional bureaucrats in Washington D.C.

The last thing America needs is the weaker military Democrats like Dennis Kucinich are proposing.

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