Romney Outlines His Tax-Free Vision of Defense

In a Texas speech this week, Romney outlines his "four point" strategy for 21st Century defense.

SURPRISE, IT STARTS WITH SPEND, SPEND, SPEND ON MILITARY

After the appropriate mentions of Jihad and how terrible they are, he goes on for four points:

1. Spend (tax-free?) more to "strengthen" the military
   
1. Add to the cost of the standing army, by adding 100,000 troops. (It's not clear if that is in addition to those already in the works under Bush).
   
2. Use 4% of GDP as the arbitrary minimum for defense spending.
   
3. Appoint defense industry experts (foxes?) and independents to cut out the pork in military procurement.
   
2. Spend oodles of public money on research to become Energy Independent (but, "license" "our" technology finds to the rest of the world...hummm.)
3. Transform our civilian efforts, a la Goldwater-Nichols.
   
4. "Strengthen" old alliances and forge new partnerships (an "alliance for hope and prosperity")
   

BLURRY VISIONARY?

I'd like to know just how much of #1 is, like Newt, preparing to fight the last war (i.e. Iraq). Are we preparing for more nation building contingencies?

If GDP grows exponentially and spending on threats is a constant proportion (4%), is the assessment here that threats in relation to the U.S.'s capacity to handle them are growing exponentially, too? When I hear such things, I'm for zero-based budgeting.

I worry that all these transformation efforts put too much authority in the hands of a few people. I wish we could find just as many ways to incent co-operation, without having to build bigger organizational pyramids.

"Free trade and investment" are ... controversial ways to build new alliances for prosperity, if Romney hadn't noticed ...

Guiliani Lays out Counterterrorism Plan: More "War"

Speaking at the C-PAC get-together in D.C. today (3/2), Rudy Guiliani laid out his vision for counterterrorism. In short, more "war" and keep on the "offense".

"War" means that he most likely is not going to view counterterrorism as a multi-dimensional effort to dispassionately bring justice to criminals and marginalize their political messages. In fact, "justice", longtime staple of anti-terrorism doctrine, was never on his lips even in lip-service, just "prosecution". Few, if any, of America's allies that I know of think of war-footing as appropriate to counterterrorism cooperation and execution, and, if they do, not as conceptually foundational in the way that the GOP is embracing it.

According to Rudy, the USA will continue to "use our military" and hope for the time when "down the road" Americans and others are friends again.

Being on the "offense" includes always responding to terrorism (he finds fault in inactions like an absence of response to the USS Cole bombing, he says). "Offense" also includes the PATRIOT act and "interrogation".

He skips over whether Operation Iraqi Freedom is/was relevant or not as a "response", a silence that will surely catch up to him, along with the fact that the response to Cole and the African Embassy bombings was to improve intelligence and an Executive finding for the CIA (as best I recall without looking it up), rather than just 'blow shit up', although that was tried too, when Clinton blew up what turned out to be a fertilizer factory.

At a time when Spain and Britain have brought criminal trials for post-9/11 acts and the US Administration's actions may have greatly complicated the same, his legal approach seems like an blind endorsement of all things Bush, including indefinite detention at the behest of the CIC and what seems to amount to a largely procedural justice doled out by the ninth-circuit, who handle the few appeals available related the combat-tribunals set-up in political haste before the mid-term elections by the last Congress.

Nothing - nada - on the long war or the long, twilight struggle. Nothing - nada - on how to confront extremism and the growing threats from rampant antiamericanism. Nothing - nada - on energy independence. Nothing - nada - on paying for "war". Nothing - nada - on readiness at home. Nothing on nation building. Nothing on the problems with the military and the inter-agency process that Newt, a former insider with some knowledge of Washington and not just a former mayor with a speech in hand, has been on about (see prior postings on Newt).

In other words, his speech amounted to George Bush, not even George Bush lite, in which we placate ourselves by "talking tough" about and to terrorists. I guess these feel-good speeches are what play to the crowds at C-PAC.

Still, it is political mastery to know your crowd well enough that you can simultaneously call the Congress cowards for ducking hard decisions with their no-confidence vote, while delivering a speech that avoids many of the hard questions about National Security!