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| Quickstrike-ER Sea Mine waiting to be loaded onto a B-52 |
By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.
SAN DIEGO: Trump’s promised defense budget boost probably won’t materialize, the former Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said today, so we can’t afford to grow a larger military. Instead of more ships and troops, retired Adm. James Winnefeld said in a rare public appearance, the military should prioritize investment in new ideas. His own service, for example, should overcome its post-1945 reluctance to lay mines off enemy shores and deploy networks of smart mines. The Army should cut soldiers to buy more modern equipment and stockpile a lot of it in Europe.
The defense world is suffering from “irrational exuberance,” Winnefeld warned the AFCEA-USNI West 2017 conference here this morning. It’s like Charlie Brown thinking Lucy is really going to let him kick the football this time, he said: There’s a “yawning gap between the expectations that are being raised regarding increases to our defense budget and the likely real outcomes.”
“All the talk about a major plus-up has got a lot of people in the services and in industry pretty excited about what we might do with all of this manna from heaven,” Winnefeld said, “(but) does anybody here believe our Congress will really deliver on this?” Trump’s deficit-busting agenda — a stronger defense, a border wall, new infrastructure, tax cuts, and by the way no reductions in entitlements — is too much for a legislature that can’t even pass routine annual spending bills on time, the admiral argued.
Read the full story at BreakingDefense