Reply With QuoteHi, my name is Bill Clinton, and I get off on cutting military funding!
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/22/ny...ner=ALTAVISTA1
Pretty damn sad state of affairs.Before his unit shipped from Kuwait to Iraq in March, First Lt. Christian Boggiano, 23, made a special appeal to his mother, Mary, by e-mail message. Please, he asked, scrounge around for a few old police bulletproof vests and mail them to me.
"Once I get up north, we'll use them on the doors and floors of the Humvees so when roadside bombs go off they'll catch a lot of shrapnel," wrote Lieutenant Boggiano, a 2002 graduate of West Point.
Over the last two months, state troopers and police officers around New Jersey have donated about 1,000 outdated, surplus bulletproof vests they owned, all in the spirit of making the thin-skinned, vulnerable Humvees safer for the soldiers and marines who ride them, Mrs. Boggiano said.
Hi, my name is Bill Clinton, and I get off on cutting military funding!
As expected, the GOP tries to blame Clinton for this.Originally Posted by Malderi
1. Clinton just finished what Bush I started. The US did not need/could not afford a Cold War military in the 1990's. There was no threat to justify 18 active-duty divisions.
2. The GOP has cut more weapons programs than Clinton. A-12 Avenger by then-Secretary of Defense Cheney (the A-12 was a disaster of a program to start with) to the Army's Crusader artillery system, which the Army wanted because artillery is one of the few fields where the US is behind.
3. Shrub basically won the conventional battles in Afghanistan and Iraq with the Clinton military he inherited. Shrub's complete lack of post-war planning is what is undermining those victories.
4. If the GOP were serious about raising the military, they would have began expanding it three years ago when Shrub took office. If they had started then, then we'd hav a few extra divisions by now. But Rumsfeld and the GOP want a smaller military. Explain why Rumsfeld wanted to cut a division from the Army and a couple of carrier battle groups prior to 9/11.
Yeah, it's all Clinton's fault.
Did he fuck yer girlfriend?
There's a difference between cutting military programs and cutting military divisions.
Military programs - R&D wise - are not needed nearly as much as a well-trained force is. We have a VERY significant advantage in tech - and a level-playing field when you factor in "home-field advantage" vs. training. American troops, combat-wise, are trained far better than your average al-Sadr zealot. However, the average al-Sadr zealot has friends with homes in the area for him to shoot a Russian-made, bought-twenty-years-ago-for-five-rubles rocket-propelled grenade. That's where the difference is.
The Crusader artillery system, the new and improved jets (with a few exceptions such as the F-22 with stealth tech for going against shoulder-fired AA missiles) are generally not needed, nor wanted, nor cost-effective, nor SAFE for house-to-house fighting. Which is what this war IS.
Bush has NOT cut overall funding. He's just redistributed it to different areas. Clinton CUT overall funding. In that day and age, the happy-go-lucky, dumbass "We're done with the Cold War and therefore have no enemies" days, it might have been politically convienient. But still, strategically stupid.
I seem to remember that Clinton wasn't tying to bring about Armageddon either. That will tend to cut costs too.
http://factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=177
two years later is in '91:
________Two years later Cheney's Pentagon budget also proposed elimination of further production of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle as well. It was among 81 Pentagon programs targeted for termination, including the F-14 and F-16 aircraft. "Cheney decided the military already has enough of these weapons," the Boston Globe reported at the time.
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Last edited by russellmz00; 04-29-2011 at 08:09 AM.
Malderi, which part of "GOP has cut more weapons programs than Clinton" did you not understand?There's a difference between cutting military programs and cutting military divisions.
Okay, the GOP has cut more military PROGRAMS than Clinton.
Bulletproof vests, as mentioned in this thread, are not a new program. The lack of them derives from lack of overall funding, and in fact, cutting programs like the Crusader artillery system puts MORE money to "little" things like bulletproof vests. The lack of overall funding can be attributed to Clinton.
Yeah, cause we know that Clinton liked to sink tens of billions into a missile defense program that every nobel laureate in physics and science says is nothing more than a pipe dream.
The new bulletproof vests (the Interceptor) are new developments in the past few years. Can't blame Clinton for not buying them when they didn't exist.
But hey, Bush still says we need to blow tens of billions on a missile defense program that will not work. Oh, as for armored Humvees and interceptor body armor, that's all Clinton.
Bullshit. That funding isn't there because the military didn't request it. It's not like this is new; stuff that isn't an expensive line-item produced in every congressional district always get the bare minimum of funding, unless we're in a shooting war.
That's the nature of the corruption game.
One thing to note is that this isn't about the regular Army, nor even the Army Reserves, but the National Guard, which has been traditionally underfunded for decades no matter what political party is currently in power. Most equipment the NG has are hand-me-downs from the Reserves, who in turn got them from the Army.
It should also be noted that many of these National Guard units have been in and out of combat areas along side the AR and RA for the last three years, yet the Pentagon didn't feel the need to order up 5000 of the armored doors turtleback humvees have until after this little used bulletproof vest program became big.
While not cheap, we're not talking about new tanks or planes here, and it's not something that takes more than a month to make the whole lot, so it's not exactly something you can blame Clinton for without assigning the same blame to Bush Sr, for when those NG humvees where in the Gulf the first time, or Bush Jr, for when those humvees were in Afghanistan and now Iraq.
Well the chances are pretty good.Did he fuck yer girlfriend?
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