Bayonet barb points to the candidates’ different world views
BARACK Obama’s debate quip about bayonets and horses may have been one of Tuesday’s most talked-about zingers, but it also underscored one of the most substantial national security differences of the election campaign.
Facing budget constraints, the US President’s military strategy focuses on trying to do more with less. As the war in Afghanistan winds down, Mr Obama is shifting more military assets to the Pacific, boosting the use of lower-cost special-operations forces like those that killed Osama bin Laden, and relying on unmanned drones to target Islamic militants.
Republican challenger Mitt Romney views the President’s planned defence cuts as an unacceptable strategy that would make the US more vulnerable to attack. He has vowed to block plans to reduce US troop levels by 100,000 and has promised to increase the size of the naval fleet to levels not seen in years.
In Tuesday’s debate, Mr Obama sought to crystallise the differences by suggesting that Mr Romney was pushing a budget-busting strategy based on antiquated thinking. Mr Romney had claimed the US navy was smaller than at any time since 1917.
‘‘We also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed,’’ the President said. ‘‘We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them.
‘‘And so the question is not a game of Battleship, where we’re counting the ships. It’s what are our capabilities?’’
John Lehman, secretary of the navy under Ronald Reagan and who now advises Mr Romney on defence spending, agreed the debate was over capabilities. He contends that the Obama strategy doesn’t meet the test.
‘‘The world has not gotten any smaller since 1916, and our dependencies and vulnerabilities around the world for our economy have grown exponentially broader,’’ he said. ‘‘The navy is just too small.’’
While Mr Obama was looking to slow the growth of the naval fleet and aimed to build it up to more than 300 ships, Mr Romney wanted a fleet of 350, Mr Lehman said. That is a larger fleet than the navy has asked for, and it would boost the defence budget as the government looks to trim the deficit and spending.
Mr Romney’s plan could lift Pentagon spending by $US2 trillion ($1.94 trillion) over the next decade. It would require him to raise taxes, severely cut other government programs or add to the deficit, said Todd Harrison, a defence analyst at the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a think tank with close ties to the Pentagon.
‘‘If you want to increase shipbuilding by as much as he wants, you have to make your numbers add up,’’ Mr Harrison said.
Along with the larger naval force, Mr Romney wants to block the President’s plans to reduce troop levels by 100,000 and add enough sailors and airmen to handle the navy expansion.
‘‘Governor Romney has no realistic plan for paying for it,’’ said Richard Danzig, national security adviser to Mr Obama’s campaign and secretary of the navy under president Bill Clinton.
The Romney campaign says the costs can be offset by targeting Pentagon bloat, reducing the size of the military’s civilian workforce and seeking to constrain overbudget programs. But that is unlikely to generate the kinds of savings to offset the budget increases.
Mr Obama has pushed for a pivot in forces to Asia, which calls for putting 60 per cent of the navy’s resources in the Pacific and 40 per cent in the Atlantic, a shift from the current even split. Mr Romney supported the aims, but he did not want the shift to come at the expense of maintaining a strong presence in other parts of the world, Mr Lehman said.
‘‘I think the President’s bayonets and horses point is to say that this isn’t the right measure,’’ Mr Danzig said. ‘‘Nobody in their right mind would say that they would take the navy of 1916 or 1917 against the navy we have today.’’
As it happens, the ‘‘horses and bayonets’’ retort overshadowed a misstatement by Mr Romney about the size of the navy fleet. Today’s force of 287 ships is higher than it was in the Bush administration — it fell to 278 in 2007.
Mr Obama also may have misspoken when he said the US had fewer bayonets than it did in 1916. More than 600,000 of those are in the military’s inventory, likely higher than the number of military bayonets in existence on the eve of World War I.
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