Military Expansion

Somewhere among my abandoned draft posts is something I started writing about the whole "Clinton gutted the military" meme. I found some good stuff in my research but the whole thing just disgusted me and in the end I set it aside. I'll boil it down to 5 points for you here:

1. Clinton claimed the peace dividend too quickly.
   
2. If one more person blames our current situation on the way "Clinton gutted the military" I'm going to puke. C'mon now... Bush has been in total control for seven years . Time to refocus your finger pointing.
   
3. The reason Bush hasn't done a damned thing to reverse the situation is because for most of his presidency he agreed with the Clintonian approach to downsizing. He (and the neocons) actually considered Rumsfeld a visionary for his "reformation" theories regarding a smaller, lighter, and more specialized military.
   
4. It doesn't take a Westpoint grad to know that if you're going to occupy a country, good old fashioned army boots on the ground is the best way to do it.
5. Parceling out various military functions to private outsourcers is just really fucking stupid.
   

All that said, I am delighted to see we have a new plan to expand the military. I am a firm believer in the grand American tradition of walking softly while carrying a big stick and I am mostly convinced that the more firepower you possess, the less you will be required to use it.

One might ask, however, how we're going to staff this military expansion since we haven't hit our recruitment goals for years. I suppose the one saving grace for the military might be the economy... if it tanks, the recruitment numbers should naturally start to rise.