Fighting Words

Defense Secretary Robert Gates today issued a stern warning to lawmakers against reducing military spending, cautioning that “shortsighted cuts could well lead to costlier and more tragic consequences later” -- including “an unacceptably high cost in America blood and treasure.”

During his opening statement before the House Armed Services Committee this morning to defend the Pentagon's fiscal year 2012 budget request, Gates used the opportunity -- perhaps his last before the panel as SECDEF -- to exhorting against precipitous cuts in military spending.

We still live in a very dangerous and very unstable world. Our military must remain strong and agile enough to respond to a diverse range of threats from non-state actors attempting to acquire and use weapons of mass destruction and sophisticated missiles to more traditional threats of other states both building up their conventional forces and developing new capabilities that target our traditional strengths.

We shrink from our global security responsibilities at our peril.

Retrenchment brought about by shortsighted cuts could well lead to costlier and more tragic consequences later, indeed as they always have in the past. Surely we should learn from our national experience since World War I that drastic reductions in the size and strength of the U.S. military make armed conflict all the more likely with an unacceptably high cost in America blood and treasure.