By the time I'd finished PT and choked down a cup of coffee this morning, our nation had a new leader and our military had a new Commander-in-Chief. After a shower and a second slug of mocha java, I found myself feeling a little antsy about my family. Not the ones closest at hand. I've played it cagey enough over the years to insure wife, kids and dog will be OK through anything short of a tactical nuke in the backyard, but I'm somewhat less confident about the welfare and future of our armed forces, every member of which I consider a younger brother or sister. You know, the folks who inherited all my stuff and my old room in the house when I moved out.
Sure, they've had to contend with combat in Iraq and Afghanistan and a frenetic operational tempo that makes them feel like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest, but my siblings are too young to remember the Carter years when a peanut farmer from Georgia - ironically a Naval Academy ring-knocker - nearly gutted our national defense capabilities in an orgy of expensive social engineering. It could happen again and if there was ever a good time for that sort of fiscal sleight-of-hand, now is not it. You could research all this - and you probably should - but let me save you the trouble by pointing out what happened to our vital intelligence services the last time a new CinC decided he needed a quick infusion of cash to fund a wide-ranging domestic agenda.
Early in his new administration, President Jimmy Carter donned a folksy cardigan sweater and nestled next to a White House fireplace to deliver a reassuring talk to all of us a la FDR's fireside chats and then proceeded to take a bloody meat-axe to the CIA and all of our other intelligence services. To cover the nut on his low-income domestic housing and government entitlement schemes for the underprivileged, he fired all the old, experienced clandestine operators and black ops warhorses who kept us abreast of worldwide bad guys and ahead of their nefarious schemes. He left us groping in the dark and impotent on some very dangerous ground.
Among the near-term disastrous results were the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, the capture and imprisonment of some four hundred hostages, and the debacle of a rescue effort that became known - much to our embarrassment - as Desert One. There's a lot more including the frustrating and distracting use of our military as lab rats in various social engineering projects that had nothing even remotely to do with national defense or military capabilities, but you should be getting the drift by now. Imagine a similar approach to finding funds for an economic recovery and draconian cuts in our Defense budgets in the middle of the long-term cultural clash that we're calling the Global War on Terrorism. It's that kind of nightmare scenario that's driving up my personal pucker-factor as the new President settles into the Oval Office.
Hopefully, it won't happen. President Obama has got to feel like the guy at an all-you-can-eat Las Vegas buffet that finds himself with a dangerously over-loaded plate. You sit there and stare at all that chow and have no idea where to start eating or if you'll ever manage to stuff it all in your face. The answer, of course, is to put a rein on your gluttony. Take a little bit of this and a little bit of that and don't let your belly override your brain. Hopefully, that will happen. If not, my military brothers and sisters are in for a rough and potentially deadly ride over the next four years.