During last night’s final presidential debate, Mitt Romney warned that if the sequestration cuts to which President Obama and Congress agreed occurs, the United States Navy will shrink to its lowest size since 1917. At that point in history the United States was not yet a superpower. The world did not yet depend on the pax Americana to keep the seas safe on a global scale.
Obama’s reacted petulantly, mocking Romney and firing off a line about “horses and bayonets” in response.
OBAMA: But I think Gov. Romney maybe hasn’t spent enough time looking at how our military works. You mentioned the Navy, for example. And that we have fewer ships that we had in 1916. Well, governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military has changed.
We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. And so, the question is not a game of Battleship where we’re counting ships, it’s what are our capabilities?
It’s quite possible that Obama displayed his entire understanding of the Navy in the clip above — we have ships on which planes can land and we have “ships” that go under water, called submarines.
Point of fact: US special forces used horses to drive the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. Point of fact: The US military still uses bayonets.
Point of fact: Submarines are not called ships. For historic reasons they are called boats. Another point of fact: Aircraft carriers need smaller surface ships and submarines nearby to defend them in hostile areas. Additionally, there are many missions for which an aircraft carrier might not be the right weapon for the job. After the sacking of the US consulate in Libya, for instance, it might have been helpful to station an amphibious Iwo Jima class carrier off the coast near Benghazi. It would have been more useful than a conventional carrier, and far more useful than the destroyer that President Obama actually dispatched to the area. They can launch attack helos, VTOL aircraft, and thousands of angry Marines if necessary. It still would have needed surface ships and submarines nearby to protect it.
In the clip, Obama said that he did not propose the sequestration that will lead to defense cuts — but he did. He said that the sequestration “will not happen,” but unless he and Congress come up with a deal soon, it will happen. It’s baked in.
But the worst aspect of that clip is when Obama mocks Romney’s warning that the sequestration cuts would reduce our Navy to its smallest size since 1917. Romney spoke a fact and laid a trap which, if the media follows up on it, will end up making Obama look the fool. Obama belittled Romney in the exchange, but in belittling Romney, Obama was really belittling Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.
In November 2011, Panetta wrote to Sen. John McCain to answer questions about the impact the sequestration spending cuts will have on the US military. That latter was published in the Navy Times, among other places. In an attachment to the letter, Panetta wrote:
If the sequestration cuts are applied over the next 10 years, a highly unlikely scenario given the upcoming election, they would result in the smallest ground force since 1940, the smallest fleet of ships since 1915, and the smallest tactical fighter force in the history of the Air Force, Panetta says.
Romney warned specifically of all of those consequences last night, practically word for word. Obama mocked him. Secretary Panetta would probably like to have a word with him today.
It’s fair to ask two questions: One, does Barack Obama really understand the consequences of the sequestration policy that he has led the nation into? Two, how can any president who believes foreign policy is his strength countenance reducing our military capabilities to such an extent?
And three, why the living h3ll didn’t he recognize the quote? George Bush would have. Clinton would have.
^^^THIS!!!^^^
The President engaged his mouth and vomited out a witty quote he heard from somewhere without consulting Brain first, like he has done far too often. And he completely misses the impact and meaning of the words he uses. Every. Single. Time.
Get out the forks and knives; Big-O is done like dinner!
That whole snark about the military was rehearsed, and it still came out stilted. You’d have thought that a Navy vet like Kerry would have pointed out that you just sound stupid if you refer to military assets incorrectly.
The Won mocks his own SECDEF and allows his own Sec State to throw herself under the bus over his own foreign policy mistakes.
Well, he did throw his own grandmother under the bus to win in 2008. If I was Michelle, I’d try to stay out of the way of the Forward bus. We still have 2 more weeks until the election, and the polls are not moving in “O”s direction.
“You’d have thought that a Navy vet like Kerry would have pointed out that you just sound stupid if you refer to military assets incorrectly.”
You do realize the sum total of what Kerry got from his military service was the second-dumbest political convention appearance of the last century, right?
That’s not fair! He also got his Christmas ’68 in Cambodia narrative “seared, seared in me.” He milked that one for all it was worth while a candidate in the late ’70s, several times on the floor of the Senate and in media appearances throughout his career. Too bad it was all a put-on which he figured out thanks to some Swift-Boat vet “reminders”.
Well, Senator Kerry was probably the only former military man on the President’s debate prep team. You have to go to war with the troop you got…
Romney spoke a fact and laid a trap which, if the media follows up on it, will end up making Obama look the fool.
If the Propaganda and Lies Ministry had an ounce of integrity they wouldn’t have to “follow up” on it…they would have been pounding on this insane and dangerous fiasco from the outset.
If they had a modicum of patriotism instead of traitorism coarsing through their veins, they wouldn’t oppose EVERY American act of self-defense in the last 50 years.
If they weren’t such lying, distorting, obfuscating and egregiously biased pond scum, they wouldn’t coverup EVERY disaster foisted upon this Republic by Obama and his minions and lackeys…of which they are part and parcel.
WE have to first make Panetta’s quote go viral, THEN….WE have to make a YouTube video of Panetta saying it, contrasting his words against Obama’s…THEN,…WE ….have to deliver it to anyone who will listen.
Our problem, all along…is that we keep expecting that the Propaganda and Lies Ministry is going to do their job. They are. It’s just that their job description and ours do not match. They believe that their job is to be traitors against the American people. THAT job…they do well.
And, they should be hung for it.
Of course the only military enemy that Obama had in mind was al Qaeda.
Actually even Iran has submarines, so “capability” has escalated dramatically on both sides, and has almost no bearing at all on net numbers. Much less China and Russia.
And it’s double-wrong because it’s Obama’s own initiative to give up the two-war capability, so he IS accepting a decreased CAPABILITY, so don’t go on about ships-under-the-water.
It was a childish, wrong, stupid, and petulant comment. Tis true, that in a debate format it earns a small number of points, especially if (sadly) unrefuted.
Its not the weapons themselves that matter, its the political will to use them that matters.
No matter how many ships we have in the Navy, if we define “Naval action” in the modern age as dropping off bottles of water to Tsunami survivors then the Navy as formed does not justify its expense. However, if you define the Navy as a Military force that keeps war far from our shores by projecting our national power at parts of the globe where international law and disregard for the sanctity of human life are the norm, then you will surely understand that the US Navy is smaller, older and less capable of meeting that mission than it has been in the past.
To the Presidents point, Nuclear Submarines dont grow on trees. You dont declare war and then go make an Army or Navy to fight it. You fight with what you have at the time. If you don’t have enough when the war breaks out, well, you lose, and when I say “you” I mean the United States of America, all of it, Red States and Blue States lose.
And when you lose a war at sea, people die. First, the people in the Navy and Marines who find themselves without enough ships, sailors and Marines to do the mission they were asked to do by the civilian leadership of the country, then the civilians they were trying to protect also die.
History is filled with examples of the cost and horror of losing wars.
I’m not sure the President understands the arc that is in this equation. We are fighting today with the legacy of decisions that were made in 1998-2002. If we choose to make a set of decisions today that leaves this nation with even less Navy than it has today, we are consigning the leadership of the nation for the next few years to a future where there are very few options.
It is precisely this lack of options that leads to bad decision making by the civilian leadership. We can find ourselves negotiating in places where we should be fighting and what might have been a small dispute can easily become a war that spans the globe.
You might think it costs a lot to build and maintain a Navy but the cost in real human lives of not having the option when you need it can be far more expensive.
Good analysis, Frank.
As the saying goes, you go to war with the army (navy, air force) you have, not the one you wished you had.
Nothing the Fraud’s says has anything to do with reality. He invents his own reality, with the expectation that pravda will roll over on it’s back and spread its legs.
It’s even rare for the Fraud to cite a fact; he probably cited less than a tenth of the data point that Romney cited in the debates. It would be interesting if somebody would go through the debates, pull out his “facts”, and determine what percentage are actually true. It would be an astonishingly low number.
The other thing that all marxists do all the time is to reinterpret (i.e., lie about) what they said earlier. They don’t even accept the concept of truth or reality in the first place. Everything that happens is just a new event to exploit to increase their power and wealth. They don’t treat life as a landscape painting, they treat life as paintbox; and if forced to react to an inconvenient landscape, they simply paint over it.
Out of frying Panetta, into being fired.
Understand it? It’s what Obama (the Choomer-in-Chief) wants.
How can he make America “suitably humble,” if we still have the accoutrements of a superpower.
To quote Cheech an Chong, “Peace, Love, Dope.”
Well, my first thought was since when does our Navy need horses and Bayonets but I guess I’ve been out to long because then I thought oh, yeah, they have the ship’s armory with rifles and bayonets and such just in case. Still not sure about the horses though some of the meals I got in the short time I was aboard a Navy vessel could have been…. Naw, not even a Navy cook. :O
I’m not really going to comment one way or the other, except that the day of the battleship may be returning eventually, because I see defense continuing to gain over aerial offense if state of the art systems (current, forecast) are fielded.
At some point in the next twenty–esp. if rail guns come on line–we are going to have to consider changing the fleet mix. Aerial offense simply may not have the mass needed against a peer competitor using AAW defenses that have robust non-missile portions capable of exhausting the attacker’s available stocks of stand-off weapons before the defender himself goes “winchester”.