Reduction in Forces?
Commentary by Joe Harrison

Being a life long student of history as well as a self proclaimed writer, I actually have to thank Obama; he’s just the gift that keeps on giving. In the last few weeks, I’ve literally been confused as to what subject to write on first.

As soon as I make a decision, he screws up even worse. He just keeps making the same mistakes history has shown us time and time again won’t work and we’ll all end up paying the price for them.

Today, it’s the firing of thousands of military officers.

As a country, we’ve reduced our forces many times in the past; every time the economy gets bad, we do it, every time we’ve done it, it’s cost us

big time.

The first issue I have with this is that these are officers, people who have volunteered to commit their lives to serving this nation. They’ve made sacrifice after sacrifice to get to where they are now.

Most are Captains, everyone who’s ever served in the military knows how important this rank is in day to day operations, they pretty much run the show behind the scenes, followed closely by the senior NCOs.

Our thanks to them is to fire them, to send them home where vets are facing a 29% unemployment rate. To send them home to deal with the VA, a completely broken and corrupt system which will take years to fix, if it can be fixed at all.

Here’s my next issue; if you look back in history, all the way back to the war of 1812, every time we’ve cut our forces, we ended up in war completely unprepared.

In 1812, we didn’t have much of an army at all, we couldn’t afford one yet. The military was mainly made up of citizen militias that took turns serving each month, it was pretty much like the National Guard is today. What was the result? The British captured Washington City with ease and burned it, our troops literally dropped their weapons and ran. It was the armed citizens who came together and bolstered the troops to defeat the British….think about that the next time you talk about gun control.

Next came the Civil War. Now we had a decent sized army leading up to it, the problem being, most of the soldiers and officers were from the South and seceded to serve their home states. Lincoln was forced to make a desperate plea for volunteers to invade the Southern states, but after the first couple of battles, it didn’t work out so well for him. He ended up having to invent the draft, this was quickly followed by the draft riots in New York and other areas. Why do you think this was? Contrary to what you learn on TV history and politically correct teaching, the majority of the population of the North had no desire to go to war with the South and definitely weren’t going to volunteer to invade them. The fact remains, the Federal Government was ill prepared and were forced to scramble to get enough forces to go to war.

Next came WWI, once again we had cut our forces to the bone. The war went on for years but we still did not prepare. By the time we had drafted and trained enough troops to really get involved, it was almost over, we just caught the tail end of it.

Going into WWII we had really cut our troops because of the depression. Most Americans didn’t see that as our war and really didn’t want to get involved at all. Then along came the attack at Pearl Harbor and once again, there we were with our pants down around our knees. At that time, Americans were different though, everyone pulled together. Men volunteered by the millions and women stepped up and took their places in the work force. Look around at the millennials of today. Do you see them doing the same thing? I hardly think so.

Once these cuts are made, our forces will be smaller and weaker than they were before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Think about what’s going on across the globe today. The middle east is a complete mess, add the fact that Israel is about to be fighting every neighbor they have and you can see the explosion of events headed their way.

We’re pulling out of Afghanistan soon. Do you not see the same thing happening there as in Iraq?

Russia is watching us weaken our defenses, in response, they’re building theirs as fast as they can, preparing to move east, country by country until they rebuild the USSR.

China has always had a pretty weak navy, but we learned last year that they’re building aircraft carriers as fast as they can. They do this as they’re slowly but surely making moves to take over all of their Asian neighbors.

Iran is working as fast as they can to build nuclear weapons, I don’t think I need to say anything else about that.

Our relationship with Germany is extremely strained right now, because they caught us spying on them. It seems I recall us having to fight them in a couple of wars already, I don’t think they’ll take much more of that crap off of us.

Pretty much the entire Continent of Africa is involved in an armed conflict of some kind or another. Lord knows how long we can stay out of that mess.

The bottom line is, since the birth of this nation, we’ve never faced as many threats from across the world as we’re facing right now. Anyone who thinks we’re not headed for war somewhere, possibly another World War, needs to study up on their history.

And when all this happens, when it all hits the fan, who will we call on? We’re going to turn to those same officers who we’re kicking to the curb now. We’re going to ask them to come back and save us again.

Here’s the strange part, most of these people are the kind who wouldn’t give it a second thought. They’d put that uniform back on and step up without asking a single question. These are the people who we’re turning our backs on now