Carly Fiorina has surged to near the top of the GOP Leaderboard on the strength of two positive debate performances. In last week's offering, she used about a minute of the time she was allocated to lay out some of the high points of her thinking about national defense. In response, the Washington Post's Walter Pincus had a piece out yesterday that methodically takes her to task. Let me now return the favor.
I will take quotes from Mr. Pincus' piece and expound upon them.
"Having proposed major steps to make the U.S. military “the strongest military on the face of the planet” — which it already is — she never said how the government would pay for her proposals."
While I agree with Mr, Pincus that the U.S. military is the world's premier force, this position does not necessarily mean that it is well-formed or postured for the future. Ms. Fiorina and most of the other GOP candidates believe there are steps that should be taken to improve and enlarge the force--with which Mr. Pincus apparently disagrees. That he takes her to task for how she would pay for her proposals is a fair charge--to a point--but surely he must have noticed the number of people on the stage and the degree to which Ringmaster Tapper was cutting people off.
Focus instead on her next point: “What I would do, immediately, is begin rebuilding the 6th Fleet.”As Stars and Stripes, the Pentagon’s newspaper, diplomatically put it the day after Fiorina spoke: “Her meaning wasn’t immediately clear — the U.S. 6th Fleet is less a collection of ships than a command structure for operating American warships in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Moreover, the fleet is one of the few growing military commands in Europe.”Fiorina could have noticed that, beginning in March, the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and its strike group of five ships, consisting of about 6,000 sailors and Marines, began a planned tour of the 6th Fleet area and that four destroyers were being based at a U.S. Navy facility in Rota, Spain.
Lots to unpack here. First, Mr. Pincus is on thin ice pointing to the TR's -- or any other carrier for that matter -- passage through the Med on the way to the CENTCOM AOR. Indeed, EUCOM derives some value from these transits, but that is exactly what they are--transits. The propensity of insecurity to break out on the rim of the Med between these transits continues to be inconvenient to the relevance of his thinking. As for Stars and Stripes pedantry (approvingly cited by Mr. Pincus), while the Sixth Fleet is indeed a command structure, the forces under its command are dramatically fewer than they once were, and pointing to it as "growing" is interesting only from the standpoint of it having really nowhere else to go but up.
Another Fiorina proposal was to “conduct regular, aggressive military exercises in the Baltic states.” Has she ever inquired about “Baltops,” an annual military exercise in the Baltic Sea and surrounding land areas run by the U.S. military since the 1970s? The 43rd one was held with much publicity in June, with 17 countries and 5,600 ground, naval and air force personnel taking part. Activities took place throughout the Baltic Sea and in Poland, Sweden and Germany.
Pincus is correct in citing BALTOPS as an example of such an exercise, but he is assuredly cherry-picking from the most recent example--which was indeed impressive and representative of the kind of exercise that SHOULD be routinely conducted, as Fiorina states. What Pincus does not provide is any sense of the degree to which BALTOPS had dramatically declined in size and scope over the years.
In Pincus' defense, what Ms. Fiorina is suggesting in terms of force buildup would indeed cost more than we are currently spending on defense. Logically, she or any other candidate will have to provide voters with some sense of where the money to do so will come from. But his insistence that doing so should have been part of a sixty second soundbite in the midst of a food-fight of a debate is off the mark.
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