The Good and Bad of Gates's Agenda - Max Boot, Commentary
... He proposed many initiatives that make sense. These include spending an extra $2 billion on intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities including 50 new Predator-class unmanned aerial vehicles; $500 million more for helicopter operations; and $500 million for training and equipping foreign militaries to fight our mutual enemies. Other valuable increases include more Special Operations Forces, more cyberwarfare specialists, and more Littoral Combat Ships that are especially useful for operations such as hunting pirates and terrorists.
I am also amenable to some of the cuts he proposed. I have never been convinced of the need to buy both the F-22 and F-35, so I think Gates made a perfectly defensible decision to stop buying more F-22s while increasing and speeding up the acquisition of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. I am also concerned that future Navy ships are ruinously expensive and too vulnerable to low-cost missiles...
Gates described his decision to halt and restructure the Army's Future Combat System as the hardest call he had to make (he said he didn't reach a final decision until this weekend), but I believe it was the right call. The conceit behind the FCS program -- that a single line of lightly armored vehicles could meet all the needs of the army in the future -- was always questionable...
More at Commentary.
Obama and Gates Gut the Military - Thomas Donnelly and Gary Schmitt, Wall Street Journal
... Mr. Gates justifies these cuts as a matter of "hard choices" and "budget discipline," saying that "[E]very defense dollar spent to over-insure against a remote or diminishing risk . . . is a dollar not available to take care of our people, reset the force, win the wars we are in." But this calculus is true only because the Obama administration has chosen to cut defense, while increasing domestic entitlements and debt so dramatically.
The budget cuts Mr. Gates is recommending are not a temporary measure to get us over a fiscal bump in the road. Rather, they are the opening bid in what, if the Obama administration has its way, will be a future U.S. military that is smaller and packs less wallop. But what is true for the wars we're in -- that numbers matter -- is also true for the wars that we aren't yet in, or that we simply wish to deter.
More at The Wall Street Journal.