Trading soldiers' lives for election-year votes
■"A Reader's Guide to Base Closings," editorial, New York Times, 28 August 2005, p. WK9.■"Threat of Submarine Base Closing United Connecticut's Delegation: On the same side in this fight, but wait until the elections next year," by William Yardley, New York Times, 28 August 2005, p. A19.
The Connecticut delegation is all patting one another on the back for their heroic stance to save jobs in their districts, as Groton is spared. Good for them, but too bad for the SysAdmin forces that will continue to be shortchanged as a result. Lives will be lost needlessly over the coming years, as our boots on the ground will reach for equipment that is not there, await information flows that do not arrive in time, suffer wounds that could have been prevented, and await relief that does not arrive because there are too few bodies—and politicians such as these will be to blame. They will have blood on their hands and votes in their pockets.
The NYT editorial says it all:
"We wish the commissioners had paid more heed to the fact that the counterinsurgency wars America has so far been fighting in the 21st century are very different from the kind of superpower conflicts it built its current forces and base structure around. The military's current deficiencies have nothing to do with the staggeringly advanced and expensive fighter jets and submarines that the services so love to order and military contracgtors so love to build. The problem lies in the less profitable and less politically networked areas of ground fighting forces and basic supplies.
Lieberman and Dodd should be ashamed of themselves. Both pretend to be national leaders and both were so full of shit on this deal as to defy reason.
Both make me ashamed to be a registered Democrat.