Did I hear ABC correctly?

BUFDRVR wrote:

In a pre OIF interview, President Bush (41) said his last cuts, in
'93, would have been the end of his draw down.

He also said "no new taxes." It's very easy for Bush to say *now* that he
would have not cut further, but there's no way to be sure what would have
actually happened in the event. Congress was certainly pushing for more
cuts. They wanted (and got) a balanced budget. Defense was the most
obvious bill-payer.

I'm inclined to believe that Bush would have run into the same basic
financial constraints in a notional second term. I suspect they probably
would have reassessed their plans and made further cuts.

Both his Sec. of State
(James Baker) and SecDef (our current VP Cheney) backed this up.

Clinton went much further, and much faster than Bush (41) was
prepared to go.

Right, and they have no reason to be anything but totally frank. Granted
you can't prove a counterfactual, but what people say they would have done
is not always the same as what they would have actually done.

--
Tom Schoene Replace "invalid" with "net" to e-mail
"If brave men and women never died, there would be nothing
special about bravery." -- Andy Rooney (attributed)

No Spam! wrote:
Mark and Kim Smith wrote:
The Air Force doesn't have enough planes to fly Stryker Force around
the world when it needs to go someplace? Since when did the Air
Force have a shortage of planes?

Since the US has gutted all its Armed Forces by at least 1/3 starting
during the Clinton days,

YOu mean "starting in the first Bush Adminsitration." The Bush
Adminstration's 1990/91 Base Force proposal called for a 20-30% cut in force
structure more or less across the board. True, the Clinton administration's
Bottom-Up Review cuts went deeper, but most of the total cuts had already
been planned under Base Force.

This loks liek an itneresting report on the various defense reviews (base
Force, BUR, and first Quadrennial Defense Review).

http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1387/

And I'll point out that the second Bush Adminstration had planned to cut
force levels even further under the second QDR. They were talking about
increased procurement spending (transformation, recapitalization, or
industruial support, depending on your perspective), but not major topline
increases.

--
Tom Schoene Replace "invalid" with "net" to e-mail
"If brave men and women never died, there would be nothing
special about bravery." -- Andy Rooney (attributed)

Rumsfeld was floating the idea of a military force just large enough
to fight on one front, and use the savings to buy more advandanced
weapons like UAVs. This was pre-911. A damn good thing everybody
wanted their pork and gutted the proposal.

"Thomas Schoene" wrote in message thlink.net...
No Spam! wrote:
Mark and Kim Smith wrote:
The Air Force doesn't have enough planes to fly Stryker Force around
the world when it needs to go someplace? Since when did the Air
Force have a shortage of planes?

Since the US has gutted all its Armed Forces by at least 1/3 starting
during the Clinton days,

YOu mean "starting in the first Bush Adminsitration." The Bush
Adminstration's 1990/91 Base Force proposal called for a 20-30% cut in force
structure more or less across the board. True, the Clinton administration's
Bottom-Up Review cuts went deeper, but most of the total cuts had already
been planned under Base Force.

This loks liek an itneresting report on the various defense reviews (base
Force, BUR, and first Quadrennial Defense Review).

http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1387/

And I'll point out that the second Bush Adminstration had planned to cut
force levels even further under the second QDR. They were talking about
increased procurement spending (transformation, recapitalization, or
industruial support, depending on your perspective), but not major topline
increases.

In article ,
says...
The Air Force doesn't have enough planes to fly Stryker Force around the
world when it needs to go someplace? Since when did the Air Force have
a shortage of planes?


Since forever,
the USAF can get it all there in 96 hours if they use all the airlift
asests and have a facility ot the recieving end to handle the traffic.



--
When dealing with propaganda terminology one sometimes always speaks in
variable absolutes. This is not to be mistaken for an unbiased slant.