Everybody else has linked to Tom Bruschino’s marvelous takedown of PolitiFact. The Weekly Standard describes Bruschino as the assistant professor of history at the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth. In case you missed Bruschino’s post, here’s the key pullquote:
1. On the Navy question, Romney appears to be accurate using the standard Navy metric, which is number of active ships. In 2003, the US Navy dropped below 300 active ships, and is currently at about 285. The last time the number was below 300 at the end of the year was 1916, when it was at 245. By the end of 1917, the number was 342. An excellent source is the Naval Historical Office, here: http://www.history.navy.mil/branches/org9-4.htm
I suppose you could ding Romney for personnel numbers, which were lower in the 1930s than they are now, but navies usually are judged by ship totals. See here: http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq65-1.htm
AdvertisementAs for the Air Force, that one is trickier, because I cannot find a good single source to point the way. That said, the Air Force has a large statistical collection at this page: http://www.afhso.af.mil/usafstatistics/index.asp
It appear that the figure is accurate personnel-wise. The current force has about 332,000 active duty, and the last time it was that low was in 1947, when the number was 305,000. As for numbers and ages of aircraft, the numbers vary based on active duty or counting reserves, but generally it appears that aircraft were slightly fewer and a bit older in the mid 2005-2008 range. I am not a statistician, but the specific numbers seem a bit more complicated than the statement from Romney implies. Then again, the overall statement appears to be accurate about the trend–the Air Force is older and smaller than it has been for almost its entire history.
PolitiFact took Bruschino’s data and responded that Romney was lying (“Pants on Fire”) in the South Carolina debate. As John Nolte writes, “PolitiFact Creates Their Own Facts to Attack Republicans.”
Ace dubs it “The End of PolitiFact.” Winston and O’Brien reminded us long ago how fungible facts can be; objectivity has been dead in the media for quite some time. Hopefully someone can spray in some Glade or Lysol to hide the stench while the body continues to decompose.
One thing to factor as far as Navy personnel numbers are concerned, is the amount of personnel involved in non-seagoing missions. There are medical support missions (often joint-service), security duties, communications, ‘naval infantry’, intelligence work, etc. Many of these mission requirements didn’t exist in 1916, or were handled by one branch of the armed forces, or were of a much smaller capacity. In the 1920s, a handful of Marine non-coms under a captain or major ran operations in Haiti or Nicaragua. Today, there’d be hundreds of troops from all services under the command of a two-star.
Let us all, meanwhile, especially those with no sense of military history, understand that what passed for a “destroyer” in 1916 is not to be compared to a modern “destroyer”. The modern ship could have attacked the entire US fleet at the time, and destroyed it with nary a risk of harm to itself.
Remember, the Pentagon is a government agency, so all the bad things about government agencies apply:
1) the budget must always grow.
2) we just need a few more dollars to complete this system.
3) once we rework that glitch, it will work fine.
4) after all, we’ve already spent so much on it.
5) it costs a lot to refit ships for girls.
6) we are, and can never be, wrong. (pay no attention to all the millions of times a day we ARE wrong)
7) (see number 1, again)
I would be the last guy in the world to want to start a real war like we started WWII, by sacrificing so many people and equipment in a prolonged last stand becasue we were unprepared. On the other hand, I’m sure I could find half the budget of any department to be entirely superfluous to the mission.
Now the problem is that the government will use cuts to hold hostage important things while urinating great streams of dough on useless crap. After all, isn’t that what they always do? They will also attempt to confuse you with “ship count” stupidity. It’s your choice whether to be stupid along with them.