What did this have to do with McGovern? (1) The American people were disillusioned with our role in Vietnam. McGovern, who lost the 1972 election in a landslide, wasn’t the cause of this. (2) Going from the height of a conventional war to the end of that war should have substantially reduced our defense expenditures, all else being equal. We had 545,000 men in Vietnam in 1969; you don’t pay for that out of petty cash. (3) Despite the absence of Vietnam expenditures in the mid-1970s, we had two extraordinary (by the standards of the time) deficits in the Ford years. There was pressure to cut the budget across the board, on top of the absence of Vietnam expenditures.
Di you think Ford and Nixon could propose military budgets all on their own, BobLibDem?
What party was in control of Congress during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter presidencies? What party controlled the budget processes during that period, the Armed Services Committees and the Appropriations Committees?
And after the McGovernite takeover of the party in the late 60s and early 70s, defense spending suffered, an military readiness with it. This is the period when Democratic hawks like Scoop Jackson began to be marginalized within their own party.
Don’t play dumb. Prior to Reagan’s election there was plenty of talk about the “Goldwater” wing of the Republican party, even though Goldwater similarly lost in a landslide.
The movements these men spawned within their parties were far greater than the success they had seeking the presidency.
I was being somewhat facetious, Mr. Moto. Nixon and Ford had Democratic Congresses. But the Vietnam War was winding down. Draftees were leaving. Of course spending goes down after a war. The end of Vietnam was far more significant in the drop in defense spending than the influence of McGovern.
OK, explain what about that movement is still present in Dem policy stances today.
I’d agree that it was in bad shape by the mid-70s; you had a generation of noncoms who smoked a lot of dope in Vietnam. Maybe getting involved in that war was a mistake in terms of its effect on military morale, as well as in a zillion other ways.
My understanding had been that the military was already getting better by the end of the Carter years. The only thing in your long CBO quote that I see contradicting that more than anecdotally is the bit about spare parts. In the late 1980s, I was attending a church in Hampton, VA with a significant military population. From the stories they told, it sounds like the cannibalization of planes for spare parts was a pretty normal activity at the time, which was late in the Reagan years.
Carter, as your CBO cite says, increased defense budgets. Cartainly the decisions made by Dem congresses to get us into Vietnam and keep us there had a lot to do with our defense problems. But that’s the sort of Democratic Party you’d like to return to.
Anyhow, so far it’s all ‘the McGovernites ruined our military back in the 1970s’ (although I disagree), with no explanation of how that cancer continues in the Democratic Party of the here and now. Even if we could establish that McGovern (or the movement that bears his name) closed down the military in 1975 and sold the equipment off at a big yard sale, you still haven’t begun to address the question posed in the thread title.
No. It is obvious that by the early 1970s the military had to be rebuilt after the strain of the Vietnam War. This did not mean that it had to be quite so big with that “hot war” ending. But materiel used up during that conflict needed to be replaced, a new generation of weapons, ships and aircraft had to be procured, and the welfare and pay of soldiers remaining in the military, especially in an all-volunteer force, had to be provided for.
All of this was neglected throughout the 1970s. Even Carter’s increased military budgets were not enough, and the situation was not fixed until the Reagan-era defense buildup.
And while a certain level of parts cannibalization is acceptable and routine, it should not be practiced to such an extent that only 1/3 of a squadron’s planes are mission capable.
You still haven’t begun to address the question posed in the thread title. But let me help you:
Looks like those McGovernite Dems are gutting today’s military, just the way they did with the Vietnam-era military.
What? Oh, right. These are the Republicans that are doing this.
My bad.
That is all true. A large part of that is due to the strains of the current war, but some other parts of this problem are a continuation of issues that began to crop up in the late 1990s, when military readiness issues of the kind I described in my cite (though not quite so severe) again began to appear.
And again, as I said before, I think the defense cits of the early 1990s were too deep, and have led us now to another situation where intense investment in the military is required.
I’m happy to see that you agree in this.
The question is whether your party in Congress will pony up the necessary money to make it happen, and whether the administration will press hard enough for it. To say I’m not optimistic on either point would be an understatment.
Cites?
Shorter Mr. Moto:
- You’re right, the military is in bad shape now.
- It’s all Clinton’s fault.
- I’m glad you agree with me on point #2.
Completely aside from your ludicrous attempt to put words in my mouth, the whole thing is a bunch of bull. You have presented no cites to back up your claims. The military seemed to have few readiness problems with respect to toppling Saddam and the Taliban. What’s broken the military is its having been given a mission that is far too big for its troop strength.
Now, of course, we know that Cheney knew all along that Iraq would probably be a quagmire, but he neither built up the military (which would have been easy to do after 9/11) to be better able to handle the stresses of an Iraq occupation, nor (somewhat off topic, but worth noting) did he warn Congress or the American people, before the vote to authorize the use of force, that Iraq would likely be a long, hard slog.
Maybe you take the POV that Clinton should have ensured that we’d have an army that was up to the mission of occupying a country of 25 million people. I doubt you could have found many politicians in the 1990s who were willing to advocate that we be prepared for such an outlandish mission.
Wait…
I thought that Clinton gutted the military. I seem to see that posted all the time. Clinton was universally hated by the military because they were underfunded because of him.
However, Clinton had a Republican congress for the majority of his term.
According to Moto’s posts here, it was actually the Republican Congress’s fault, right?
-Joe
I’m certainly not letting Republicans off the hook for their own contributions to this problem. However, the difference is that the Democratic Party has a built in, institutional bias against military spending that the Republicans do not share.
Strawman. Maybe it would have been a nice start in the Clinton administration for the USS John F. Kennedy to not have been routinely and chronically shortchanged on its maintenance, to the point that the costs to fix her are now prohibitive, and she probably will have to be decommissioned.
Depends on how you mean that, I suppose. Given a fixed pool of money, the Dems are always more likely to want to spend more of it on domestic needs than the GOP will. I’d simply say that the Dems balance the relative needs of America in different ways than the GOP does, and is more skeptical than the GOP of claims of vast dangers that can only be met by equally vast military expenditures.
Like I said earlier, if that’s McGovernism, sign me up.
How so? ISTM that the Clinton defense budgets have to be viewed in terms of the threats and potential missions that were in view at the time. Occupying Iraq wasn’t one of them. Occupying Iraq is what has broken our army.
The singular of ‘anecdote’ is ‘anecdote.’
I’d love to see a cite for your “institutional bias” and the GOP’s lack of said “institutional bias”.
-Joe
I sure am glad that we’ve got these Republicans with strong defense policies in charge. 88% of Army National Guard units are “not combat ready”. Doubtlessly Mr. Moto will be along to demonstrate that under Clinton, there were less than 12% combat ready units.
This is what happens when you try to fight a war without sacrifice. Can’t have a draft, so the NG troops and reservists have to stay far above and beyond what they thought they signed up for. Gotta keep those tax cuts going to Paris Hilton, so the deficit spins out of control. Can’t provide enough body army armor and ammo to the troops, because hey they’re just going to be greeted as liberators anyway. Can’t keep the army hospital in acceptable condition, but the first order of business is to prohibit the patients from talking to the media.
Bush has done more to damage the national defense than McGovern could ever dream of. Not that combat veteran McGovern was going to let the military go down the tubes anyway. After Bush’s pitiful stewardship of the armed forces, how dare anyone accuse Democrats of being soft on defense?
I’m sure all that was because of Clinton. You can’t rearm and re-equip the entire National Guard in only six years!
You invade with the army you have, not the army you want!
-Joe
And of course, the Army itself is in piss-poor shape to fight off a genuine threat, should one arise:
And of course, we broke the Agreed Framework with North Korea because of their possible uranium enrichment program (which, if it existed, probably would have taken them 10 years or so to produce a bomb). That allowed them to re-start their plutonium bomb program, which was a real winner to begin with because they were less than a year away from being able to make a plutonium bomb. And of course, now we’re finding that there may or may not have been anything to the uranium enrichment program.
Oh yeah, terrorism has increased sevenfold worldwide during the Iraq war. And although the increases are much smaller if we exclude Iraq and Afghanistan, they’re still increases:
And that, folks, is what we’ve learned just in the past week about how the GOP isn’t making us safer.
Explain to me again, conservatives, why we’re trusting Bush and Cheney with so much as a dull knife, let alone the military power and diplomatic influence of the world’s sole superpower?
Yes, that’s all very well but you have to weigh that against his undoubted triumphs in the Wars On The Environment, Science, Common Sense and Human Decency, The War on the Constitution, and the never ending struggle to ensure the country is safe from the menace of stem cells and gays having equal rights. And who can argue with the success of the No Billionaire Left Behind program?
Fair’s fair old chap. Credit where credit is due.
Really? Who are these mysterious Dems? Do they currently run candidates in the United States?
Sarcasm aside, the idea that the Dems aren’t as in bed with the military as the GOP strikes me as ludicrous. Sure, the Dems have a lot of supporters who are anti-military…but it doesn’t seem to affect actual policy. Just look at the Cold War or the post 9/11 response.
I would definitely say the Dems are less insanely militant than the GOP…but Shaquille O’Neal isn’t a midget because he’s shorter than Yao Ming.
EDIT: Tagos, don’t forget they repelled the evil secularists in the War on Christmas. A mighty victory indeed! 
I just wasn’t sure that was over yet. I fear, the Athiests, Liberals and Satanists, (if indeed they are in any way seperate :dubious: ) merely fell back as a ruse. I expect they’ll be back before Chocolate Eating Day.
Consider the ‘peace dividend’ of the 1990s.
Like when Carter cancelled the B-1 bomber. Any Republican would have done that too.
Well, look at it. Half the Dems in Congress opposed the Iraq AUMF. And that AUMF would never have been proposed if Gore had been inaugurated.
The Dems really aren’t all that good about opposing a war that the President wants to fight; you’re right about that. But if there’s a Dem in the White House, s/he’s going to initiate a lot less military craziness than a GOP President would.