America’s Declining Military Strength

Our Armed Forces, when in its prime fighting operation, carries Marine Expeditionary Units aboard ships ready to go over the beach at almost any hot spot in the world and fight ground battles with little notice and extreme effectiveness. These MEU’s usually number 2200 Marines in special forces, reconnaissance, armored reconnaissance, armor, amphibious assault, infantry, artillery, engineer and aviation battalions, companies, and platoons. These MEU’s are highly effective and able to handle almost any kind of immediate violent challenge to the interests of the United States wherever it may crop up.

On March 21, 2011, an American F-15 went down in Libya. Immediately after the Mayday, the 26^th MEU started rescue operations from the USS Kearsarge, and a short time later two of its Harrier fighter jets, and two CH 53 Ospreys were at the scene with more than a hundred Marines. Hundreds more might easily have arrived if required. Forces like this could have shattered the assault in Benghazi in minutes.

From World War II onward, the U.S. Sixth Fleet stabilized the Mediterranean region and protected American interests there.  Until 2008, it was common practice to stock the Mediterranean with a carrier battle group, three hunter killer submarines, and an amphibious ready group with its MEU or equivalent. But in the first year of the Obama presidency this force in the Mediterranean was reduced to one almost entirely unarmed command ship. When the debacle at Benghazi happened, nothing could be done to stop the slaughter of the ambassador and his staff because there was no MEU available to put soldiers on the ground. Or…because of timidity on the part of the President and the State Department, no response was ordered.

One would think that with all the uproar in the Middle East, the United States would maintain sufficient force from the Sixth Fleet to handle uprisings against our country. We have recently seen the Muslim Brotherhood watching over the Egyptian powder keg, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb reaching from the Sahel into the Mediterranean littoral, instability in Tunisia, Bedouin kidnappers in Sinai, Hamas rockets streaming from Gaza, Lebanon protecting the Hezbollah tiger, Jordan imperiled, and a civil war raging in Syria. I read that the al Nusra branch of al Qaeda in Syria has 12,000 soldiers in that country fighting against the government army; if Bashar al Assad’s government falls, it seems likely to me that al Qaeda will run the country.  All these things should alert our government that preventive and battle-ready forces must be continuously deployed to handle emergent situations such as terrorist warlords murdering our diplomats in Libya.

But…unfortunately, the Obama administration has opted to show the weakest military response possible, short of pulling our forces out of the Middle East, altogether.

I have heard President Obama say that with modern weapons and reconnaissance resources, it is not necessary to have lots of ships and soldiers on the ready. Stability can be assured using modern methods rather than men and war machines. Well…it seems the truth is out. The United States was and is not ready to handle emergency situations on the ground.

There is one principle of warfare that I learned long ago in ROTC: It is impossible to control an area militarily without putting foot soldiers in place. America is not ready.

(This post was partly redacted from the Wall Street Journal of 10 April page A13.)