Conservatives have attacked Obama for the lower defense budgets for years, arguing that his insistence on pairing military spending with non-defense spending has crippled Pentagon efforts to modernize and recapitalize. The caps — known as sequestration — have been blamed for shortfalls in parts and repairs, cuts in training time and a gradual drawdown in military manpower. President Barack Obama addresses Marines in Afghanistan. Defense Department photo Obama has shouldered much of the blame for sequestration, even with lawmakers approving the plan and failing to draft a repeal.
In recent years, administration officials have tried to push back on the narrative that the president is responsible for that host of budget fights that have consumed Washington and, by extension, the military. Obama has pushed back on the idea that tighter budgets have ruined the services, one of Trump's favorite talking points. Last week, Obama said the military remains "the most capable fighting force on the face of the Earth" despite financial challenges.
Our Air Force, with its precision and reach, is unmatched. Our Coast Guard is the finest in the world. Trump has promised to do just that, but will likely face the same political obstacles.
Carafano said he is hopeful that a change in administrations will produce different results. We just have to have a president who is interested. In speech before troops in Florida in December, Obama said that he never shied away from military intervention, but instead took a responsible, cautious approach to those grave decisions.
He has received criticism both for failing to zero-out those deployments and moving too fast to pull down the numbers before those regions were fully secure. Nearly 60 percent of poll respondents said the drawdown of U. A slightly smaller 55 percent said moves to pull U. While half of troops surveyed see the reduced emphasis on large-scale overseas missions as harmful to military readiness, 45 percent see the shift to training and advising missions as a positive for the armed forces.
For his part, Obama appears to have no such qualms about the approach. They point to what they see as an overly trusting agreement with Iranian hard-liners over nuclear weapons and indecisive, unfulfilled threats against Syrian President Bashar Assad for attacks on his own people.
Retired Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, head of U. Stanley McChrystal was effectively fired by Obama after reports of their fights over military strategy were made public. In , Army Lt. The president's conflict with military leaders came even as First Lady Michelle Obama launched the White House Joining Forces initiative, designed to better educate the public on the service and sacrifice of military personnel and their families.
In a speech on Dec. Obama considers his diplomatic achievements — particularly the nuclear deal with Iran, the Paris agreement to fight climate change and a restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba — to be his primary foreign policy legacy.
Spending and casualties both have fallen sharply. Rhodes argued that Obama also made key decisions that kept the country from being pulled into other conflicts. But the award came at an awkward time. It is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason. Gates said Obama also was ambivalent about sending more troops to Afghanistan in Obama had his own priority, Gates wrote. He never quite succeeded. Obama leaves office with 8, troops still in Afghanistan.
Their mission is to support a weak central government that is still battling the Taliban — 15 years after a U. In his first term, the Obama team tried to turn attention away from the Middle East with a strategic pivot toward the Asia Pacific region, rich with growing economies and potential friends nervous about Chinese expansion. But he mostly relied on Predators and other increasingly sophisticated drone aircraft — first to conduct aerial surveillance and then to launch deadly Hellfire missiles.
Drones kept U. At least in public, Obama wrestled with his growing reliance on drones and his use of them to carry out targeted killings. He even ordered the killing of a U. Obama authorized the drone strike that targeted and killed him in September That suggests the weapons were not as precise, or the intelligence as reliable, as the administration has claimed. In a speech at National Defense University in May , Obama promised to provide more transparency about targeted killings.
The tally did not include the wars in Iraq, Syria or Afghanistan. Independent groups put the death toll much higher, saying hundreds of civilians were killed outside the war zones, and many hundreds more in them.
Moreover, it needs to start laying out at a rolling five year plan for US spending on both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Such a plan will have to change regularly, but it is time to stop pretending that a long war does not have consistently high costs. The United States must define these costs, explain why each cost is necessary, and prepare the Congress and American people for the realities of what is to come.
The US and ISAF effort to train adequate Afghan security forces has been completely reorganized, and the Administration now seems committed to providing the proper level of funds, trainers, and mentors. The Department of Defense has already said that it will provide an updated report on April 28th, and the new team should not be judged before that report is available.
Moreover, the Report on Progress toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan that has just been issued finally makes it clear that the readiness categorization system the US has used for both Iraqi forces and Afghan forces has never reflected actual military or police effectiveness in the field — a breakthrough in the integrity of reporting that is long overdue.
The best team in the world, however, cannot function if it is rushed to produce force quantity to meet a deadline in ways that sacrifice force quality. Military history is often the history of the fact that a focus on numbers per se is a proven way to lose a war.
Moreover, creating effective forces requires experienced trainers, mentors, and partners—not simply warm and sometimes unwilling bodies. DoD still has not made being a trainer or mentor part of an attractive career track, thus sending our best and brightest officers to jobs far less relevant to the war. It requires transparent attention to corruption and incompetence. Virtually everyone who worked on the new strategy agreed that the corruption and lack of capacity in the Afghan government at every level was as much of a threat to success as the Taliban and other insurgents.
Nothing that President Karzai has done as of yet has indicated that this situation has changed at the top. Assessments of the situation in Kandahar have spotlighted how serious a threat it is at the provincial and local levels, and Marja is a warning that far too little has changed in the field. US reporting should not directly confront Afghan officials, but it must show that that the new strategy can work.
It must be clear where Afghan officials are competent and honest enough to be effective, where credible improvements are underway, and where corruption and lack of capacity threaten the ability to win. This will take considerable care, but simply ignoring the fact that some elements of the present GIRoA are as much or more of a threat than the enemy is not a basis for winning any form of credibility or sustained support.
It also fails to put the level of public pressure on GIRoA that can be constructive. At the same time, Afghanistan is not the West. Moreover, US reporting should make it clear when Afghans face an almost existential need to get anything they can, while they can, because there is no credible career structure or belief in victory. It should be equally clear when the black market economy offers far more money and usually at far less risk. A US strategy based on Afghan martyrdom is not going to work.
If there is a third problem that poses a threat equivalent to the Taliban, it lies in the mix of stovepiped and half-administered US efforts that are not part of a truly integrated civil-military action plan, and an even more serious lack of civil-military coordination within and between the allied countries operating in Afghanistan. This is compound by the failure to validate requirements, manage the flow of aid money, control corrupt and ineffective contractors, and establish meaningful measures of effectiveness linked to Afghan perceptions.
The US can, however, openly address the key problems involved and their costs. It can make clear that it is not enough to deploy, pledge, or spend. Resources have to be used effectively. The NGOs that use resources effectively take risks and serve the Afghan people deserve recognition. Those that raise funds and waste them, or start projects that they rarely finish with any effectiveness, need to be named and pushed out of the country.
US reporting needs to end the compartmentalizing that largely decouples any assessment of the Pakistan side of the war from the situation in Afghanistan, and make it clear how other neighboring states impact on the war.
The US has never addressed the war in real world terms that report on both key countries. The discussion of Pakistan in the Report on Progress toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan is all of three paragraphs long and refers to a classified annex.
This is a sensitive area, but US and Pakistani cooperation is steadily improving and zero meaningful reporting does not make a case for the war or for sustained aid to Pakistan.
The same report seems undecided as to whether Iran is an asset or a malign enemy, and says far too little that is useful about the role of the states that are critical supply routes. At present, it makes little or no substantive effort to describe the cost of losing or how this effort relates to the other aspects of the terrorist threat. Skip to main content. Written By. Media Queries. Contact H. Most Recent From Anthony H. Cordesman Upcoming Event. Book Launch: Armies of Arabia.
November 12,
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