There are times in this nation's history that we have allowed military readiness to decline and had no alternative then spending more on the military to bring it back up to par. For instance, by the time Former President Jimmy Carter left office, our readiness was very much in decline. The navy did not have enough ships to handle every possible or even probably threat, and the maintenance and repairs on those ships and Navy and Air Force aircraft was in decline. Not enough spare parts were available. They would often have to cannibalize one aircraft to repair another.. President Reagan and Congress at the time, turned that around. We are now again in a similar situation. And I am not restricting such problems to democrat presidents. When the cold war ended, Bush Senior, and congress could not wait to start shutting down military bases and cut the number of troops. Then when radical Islamic terrorism picked up steam, we were not as ready as we should have been. Even now, we do not have enough active duty troops to handle Afghanistan and other threats. We are calling up reservists at a rate that we had not done since WW2. One of my colleagues at work was a marine reservist and never expected to be called up to active duty. Yet he ended up serving two tours in Iraq, and probably would have served a third, except for losing a limb on the second tour. His unit did pull a third tour. Perhaps we can cut some of the wasteful spending such as what comes with social tinkering for the sake of political correctness...for instance sensitivity classes over gays and transsexuals in the military. We can also stop members of congress from demanding unrequested overahauls, just for the sake of employment at a shipbuilder in their district.
