Guest post by Investor's Business Daily
Defense Spending: Two more weapons systems, including the Navy's premier attack missile, have been targeted for elimination by the administration years before their usefulness ends or replacements are ready.
How ironic that Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Barack Obama used the Tomahawk missile he now seeks to scrap as his weapon of choice when on March 19, 2011, he launched Operation Odyssey Dawn and fired 112 Tomahawks at Libyan targets to enforce a U.N.-backed no fly-zone in support of Libyan rebels fighting Moammar Gadhafi.
Future presidents will not be able to carry such a big stick. Along with the Hellfire air-to-ground attack missile, the Tomahawk is considered by the administration to be one of those Cold War weapons no longer needed.
Under Obama's budget proposals, the Navy, which as recently as last year had plans to buy 980 more Tomahawks, the primary cruise missile used throughout the fleet, will see purchases drop from 196 last year to just 100 in 2015. The number will then drop to zero in 2016.
The U.S. used 220 Tomahawks in the fight with Libya, according to the Washington Free Beacon. With the States using about 100 Tomahawks annually, our inventory will be depleted around 2018. No future purchases are planned, and no replacement is in the pipeline.
"It doesn't make sense," Seth Cropsey, director of the Hudson Institute's Center for American Seapower, told the Free Beacon. The move, he said, is "like running a white flag up on a very tall flagpole and saying, 'We are ready to be walked on.'"
If someone were trying to "reduce the U.S. ability to shape events" in the world, Cropsey added, "they couldn't find a better way than depriving the U.S. fleet of Tomahawks. It's breathtaking."