Republican opposition to the president’a choice of a former Republican senator, Chuck Hagel, for secretary of defense was puzzling at the time to many Washington watchers. It’s far less so now.
As the GOP feared, Secretary Hagel is not the hawk that their hardliners expect in that role. Because he is a Republican, they feel betrayed by his willingness to rein in military spending and take wind from their sails on their most reliable plank, the never-ending arms race. In late February, the Associated Press reported, “Looking beyond America’s post-9/11 wars, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel . . . proposed shrinking the Army to its smallest size in 74 years, closing bases and reshaping forces to confront a ‘more volatile, more unpredictable’ world with a more nimble military. . . . He said the priorities he outlined reflect a consensus among America’s military leaders, but Republicans in Congress were quick to criticize . . .”
That consensus is widely questioned by Republicans in Congress who count on mindless calls for more defense, not less, to keep them in office. Unless they sing this one-note hymn, they are likely to face a Tea Party challenge in the Republican primaries. In the Tea Party, there’s no room for consensus, no room for bipartisanship, no room for the spirit of the Founding Fathers.
Afloat on the checkbooks of such billionaires as the infamous Koch Brothers, who are oligarchs verging on anarchists, the Tea Party has become the tail that wags the dog they’re making of the House of Representatives. Will timid Republicans stand by and let the Tea Party destroy first the GOP and then the America once known as the land of the free and the home of the brave. Where are the brave today in the Republican Party?
May they draw courage from the example of Secretary Hagel, who puts country first, leaving ideologues to stew in their rancid brew. Who better than a Republican secretary of defense to show Republicans the global reality of the 21st century? He shows them what too many white, male conservatives have misplaced or lost: grit.
“This is a time for reality,” said the secretary, while emphasizing the sea change that technology has produced in military preparedness. While the Pentagon’s budget is as large as the combined arms spending of the ten nations next in the race, the competition today from China and Russia is focused on technical prowess, not force size. Keeping a technological edge will provide more security than ground forces can.
Still, his budget request has prompted the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Howard McKeon, R-CA, to declare, “What we’re trying to do is solve our financial problems on the backs of our military, and that can’t be done.” Other Members of Congress are alarmed that Hagel plans to phase out various military bases, which are sacred cows in the states that have them.
Still the Congress knows budget deficits and the national debt cannot be reduced as long as the discretionary funding each fiscal year goes half to defense and half to all the domestic needs. That imbalance will keep us falling farther behind the global leaders on a broad range of needs, from health sciences to education and workforce development, to basic research and new technology — the source of the edge that is Hagel’s focus. His GOP badly needs his grasp of reality, and not the tunnel vision of Tea Party drum-beaters.
Frank Mensel — March 2014