In Cincinnati on Monday, President George W. Bush accomplished two important things with just one speech: he demonstrated his capacity to think towards the future military needs of this country and its presence overseas, and he managed to demonstrate the Kerry campaign’s military ignorance and its willingness to put other countries’ feelings above that of the United States’ national security.

Since the downfall of the Soviet Union and Communist Europe, it has been blatantly obvious to even the most irrational of people that our military is over-deployed.  What purpose is served by having troops stationed in Europe on the forefront of a war that has been over for a decade?  With the cataclysmic start to the War on Terrorism in September, 2001, our country was informed of the next threat and the incapacity of our troops in Europe to fight it.  We need a more mobile and more easily deployable force that is impossible with the larger and cumbersome force stationed in Europe.  Our leaders, led in part by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recognized that the war on terror could not be won by troop strength or deterrence as the Cold War was.  Rather, it would be won by quickly-mobilized lethal responses to terrorist attacks through an inter-branch cooperation on a never-before-seen scale.  The slow, lumbering divisions of Europe did not accomplish the majority of fighting in Afghanistan or Iraq.  Special forces and laser-guided bombs did, followed by deployed soldiers to help safeguard the peace.  These backup forces, however, do not have to be stationed in Europe to be able to be deployed to their needed areas.

Once again, Kerry contradicts himself in an effort to garner votes.  Despite the fact that twenty years ago he staunchly opposed and routinely voted against increases in our troop strength overseas, he now is staunchly opposed to any suggestion that we shrink our overseas military force.  As one would expect, his reasons are disingenuous.  An argument could be made that the replacement of our deployed forces by faster and smaller units might weaken our country’s presence overseas, but the Stryker attack squads and other similarly small units are more accurate in the application of their lethal power with fewer civilian casualties than trying to drive armor into the heart of cities.

Former NATO commander, General Wesley Clark, even insists that the troop strength changes carefully made by the Clinton administration were sufficient to address the troop realignment necessitated by the end of the Cold War.  I suppose that is one way to spin Clinton’s wholesale gutting of our military, his unmitigated destruction of morale, and his cutting of divisions and funding with the subtlety of a chain saw.

As one would expect, the focus of Kerry and his surrogates isn’t on troop strength.  In fact, Clark demonstrates that the Democrats’ allegiance is not to the United States, but to Europe.  “As we face a global war on terror with al-Qaeda active in more than 60 countries, now is not the time to pull back our forces,” Clark says.  Why?  “Withdrawing forces from Europe will further undermine already strained relations with longtime NATO allies.”  This is where his emphasis lies: with what our NATO allies will think if we withdraw troops, and of course the damage to their economies when our soldiers’ billions of dollars in economic impact goes too.  In all fairness, who really cares if it will strengthen our national security?  On Wednesday, Kerry told the same group of veterans that we must “renew alliances based upon shared interests and a common vision for a safer world.”  What shared interests?  Why are we subsidizing the governments of so-called allies like Germany and France who ignored the WMD threat posed by Iraq so they could further line the pockets of their military-industrial factories by selling illegal items to Saddam?  Is that really the “vision for a safer world” Kerry envisions?  Why should the United States continue to use our deployed military to effectively dump billions of tax dollars into countries that willfully ignored UN sanctions and international law?

Not that Kerry is even willing to admit a cost savings.  His post-Sandy Berger foreign policy advisor, former UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke insists, “It is not going to save us money.  It will cost billions of dollars to bring these troops home.”  He is, of course, absolutely right, even if he does ignore the whole picture.  It will cost billions to bring these troops and their families home, but it’s already going to cost that through their normal deployment cycle.  In the end, we will save money because the cycle of troop rotation will inevitably end, or at the very least be sharply decreased.

Both Clark and Holbrooke willingly ignore the facts by making these statements.  Bush is not looking for a complete withdrawal of forces from overseas, he is looking for the lumbering, slow-moving military construct that is in western Europe to be replaced by faster-moving strike teams capable of moving quickly from eastern Europe to counter any terrorist attack.  These are countries that are closer to the actual battleground of the war on terror, and countries that genuinely helped the United States fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Our military must be transformed in order to fight the next major war, and we must ask ourselves what is accomplished by continuing to reward countries that undermine our national security.  Should their politicians continue to use the billions of dollars infused into their economies by our soldiers while scoffing at us or standing in the way of our security?

The answer, of course, is that they shouldn’t.

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