Building stronger armed forces

By Richard Danzig

Our military continuously evolves as it confronts challenges, suffers setbacks and achieves successes.

This is a time of achievement. With exceptional military and intelligence coordination, we have killed or captured almost every Al-Qaida terrorist involved in the 9/11 attacks and literally dismantled the group that attacked us on that terrible day.

We have ended the war in Iraq and are beginning to transition out of Afghanistan. After a decade of repeated deployments, our men and women in uniform are coming home.

With a skilled military and diplomatic effort, we helped the Libyan people end the tyrannical rule of Moammar Gadhafi, and the world is safer today because of it.

Emerging now from over a decade of war, we again have to look ahead.

Next year, the Defense Department will invest more than half a trillion dollars in building weapons of the future, preparing service men and women to fight the next war and taking care of those who nobly volunteered to serve.

The new defense strategy refocuses resources on Asia and the Middle East by maintaining 11 aircraft carriers and 10 air wings, keeping our big-deck amphibious fleet, sustaining the Marine Corps and Army structures in the Pacific, and developing a floating staging base to support special operations forces, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and counter-mine missions.

To protect our nation against dangerous non-state actors (like al-Qaida) and cyberwarfare, we will sustain growth in special operations forces, continue growth in Air Force and Army unmanned Combat Air capabilities and increase our cyber abilities.

President Obama has already demonstrated the power of these types of weapons to inflict enormous damage on our enemies - from al-Qaida in Pakistan to Gadhafi in Libya to pirates in Somalia.

Over the past several weeks, I've heard some people argue that the proposed defense budget is not large enough to keep our country safe. I've heard others say that the reductions do not go deep enough.

As is true with so many things in life, context is important. President Obama is seeking $614 billion - more than President Bush spent in 2007 - which amounts to twice as much funding as the force that routed the Taliban and took over Afghanistan in a few weeks at the end of 2001, and a third more funding than the force that overran the Iraqi military in 2003.

It defies logic to argue that today's military will be less able to defend the country and advance America's interests overseas than the one that performed so impressively in the first years after 9/11.

Defense spending will continue to grow after 2013. True, it will grow more slowly now that we are no longer engaged in two simultaneous wars. But we will continue to add billions of dollars to the Defense Department budget every year.

The American people deserve a commander-in-chief who demonstrates strong, smart leadership in this dangerous world, and who confronts the tough problems we face overseas in close consultation with his military and civilian advisers. We have that president now.

In contrast, Republican president candidate Mitt Romney - after vacillating on the use of our military in places like Libya - has argued for rigidity in the allocation of our resources. He alleges that he would set defense spending at an arbitrary floor of 4 percent of GDP, without any strategic rationale for the number, attention to the efficiency with which it would be spent or explanation about how he would pay for it.

While the president has articulated a compelling strategy, Romney is picking a dollar figure out of the air, with no strategic justification for it and no plausible path to paying for it.

Contrary to what Romney has said on the campaign trail, our military leaders have made it crystal clear that our armed forces will maintain the ability to confront two enemies at the same time. When he accuses the United States of having the smallest Navy since 1917, he is ignoring the aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and SEAL teams that did not exist then.

Romney seems to think of defense spending as a one-way ratchet that should only go up. Even though he says he's committed to balancing the budget, he argues for additional hundreds of billions in defense spending tied not to military needs but to fluctuations in the economy. For such a successful businessman, his numbers just don't add up.

Richard Danzig served as the Secretary of the Navy under President Bill Clinton, and is an adviser to President Barack Obama's campaign.