Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey will run a three-day gantlet in Congress starting Tuesday morning as they face Republican critics of President Obama’s new military strategy.
Panetta and Dempsey will testify on the president’s defense budget in back-to-back-to-back hearings, beginning with the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Obama’s budget request, released Monday, cuts absolute defense spending for the first time in a decade and slashes more than 100,000 troops. Those reductions are in line with the president’s strategy revamp, which drops a requirement that the military stand ready to fight two large-scale ground wars at once.
Panetta defended Obama’s proposed cuts in opening remarks on Tuesday and reminded lawmakers that the $487 billion reduction in Pentagon spending the president is implementing is their own handiwork.
“It was this Congress that mandated, on a bipartisan basis, that we reduce the Defense budget, and we need your partnership to do this in a manner that preserves the strongest military in the world,” Panetta said in prepared testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. “This will be a test of whether reducing the deficit is about talk or action.”
Read More at The Hill. By Jeremy Herb
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There are 190 countries in the world. America has bases in 130 of them. Stop being the worlds’ police force. Get out of the UN. Shut down these bases don’t cut our forces, get out of the unconstitutional wars instead.
Protect our borders with our own troops, stop this crazy open borders of Obama and the NWO. Protect our sovereignty, impeach and arrest Obama.
The moronic Republicans should have seen this coming when they agreed to the provisions stipulated in the special bipartisan debt reduction super-committee (or whatever it was called) to gut military spending if no agreement was worked out. (As if John Kerry was ever going to do the right thing…) The question is: why does Obama want to weaken the military so? He has attacked their morality with the homosexual “normalizations”, attacked their religious principles, attacked the chaplains who can no longer pray in the name of Jesus Christ and opened military chapels to sodomitic “weddings”, weakened their morale, reduced their numbers, reduced their budget, cut support to our allies and now wants to reduce our nuclear arsenal by 80%. Why does Obama fear the military so? Remember, he said he wanted a “civilian” force as powerful as the military. Can anyone say “brown shirts?”