Rumsfeld: ****** Imminent If Congress Cuts Defense
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned that it will only be a matter of time before America endures another terrorist ****** if Congress ends up blaming the defense budget for this country’s red ink woes. “The Department of Defense is not what’s causing the debt and the deficit. It’s the entitlement programs,” he told HUMAN EVENTS in an exclusive interview. “If we make that mistake, we’re doomed to suffer another ****** of some kind, and our intelligence will be less strong and less effective.”
Before legislators attempt to take out the nation’s crushing debt on the Defense Department, they must understand that spending on the military is low compared with historical averages, said Rumsfeld. He noted that military spending from Eisenhower though LBJ topped 10% of the gross domestic product (GDP), far less than today’s 4.7%.
President Obama has already imposed $400 billion in military cuts, and there could be $800 billion more in slashing to follow in the very near future if congressional leaders do not agree on a debt-reduction deal.
Rumsfeld stressed that the military cuts looming today may be similarly disastrous to those that occurred at the end of the Cold War—a precursor, he claims, to creating the vulnerable environment that bred 9/11. The mindset then was, “we can cut the defense budget, we cut the intelligence budget, and we’ll be okay. The answer was that we weren’t okay. We didn’t have the kind of intelligence capability we needed.”
