And it is a national security crisis because 47 percent of our debt is held by foreign interests, the lion’s share of that by China. A President or a Congress can come in and cut that budget overnight, and all that investment we’ve made is lost. 3,122 talking about this. The Founders recognized that, as George Washington famously said, “To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.” Fielding a first-rate military and exercising principled American leadership in the world depends on a robust economy. Nobody in their right mind really wants to spend more on defense than is critical and necessary and most efficient to reach those objectives. Michael is the author of the book, Our Last Hope: Rediscovering the Lost Path to Liberty. It should suggest to us that we need to look at what has caused us to venture into these perhaps unconstitutional expenditures that divert the federal government’s attention from those powers and activities enumerated for it. Constitution Page 2 These are the terms that you often hear, even among some Republican Congressmen: It’s only fair to share the burden in an equal way, not just because there’s a seemingly inherent fairness about it, but it’s easier politically to do that. It takes decades to build up an infrastructure. It’s a tactic to try to gain some advantage or to preserve some bit of their power, and we would be foolish not to realize that’s their logic, that they don’t share our logic, and we should be careful not to mirror-image our values on them; they don’t share them. The rapid buildup of our forces in 1940 and 41 was far costlier than if we had maintained a smaller force as a deterrent all along. Article I, Section 8, Constitution of the United States. One, there are a lot of people on the left wing of the political spectrum, liberal internationalists—and I think our President is in this camp—who are skeptical about America’s role in the world. special) interests. Article 1 Sec. I’m also reminded that those who survived the Holocaust achieved their revenge in a sense through simply living. She said: My loving people. Maybe it’s 2 or 3 percent that something will go wrong. I especially thank Ken Blackwell and my colleague Stuart Butler for joining us to discuss this critical issue. You’ve probably seen the photographs when we were preparing for World War II, when some of the soldiers were preparing with sticks to be mobilized into Asia and to Europe. establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. My conclusion is that human capital is weak when we are not properly formed early on between the ages of 6 and 10, by parents. With the SHIELD Act, we’ll prevent that, and I’m just hoping as much as possible that Heritage and other groups will make that issue known. Let me underscore another point about the condition. They think, how much money do we have, and therefore how much security can we purchase? But I think that true diplomacy and effective diplomacy has the ability to back up with capability anything that it expresses. The fact is that when you’re talking about war and peace, most of the bad actors like the Iranians and North Koreans and others don’t share our values of peace. That’s the logic of geopolitics. That was the reigning idea in the 1920s and for much of the 1930s as well, and we saw what happened: Not only did it not stop Hitler; it didn’t stop Japan either, and it led to a Second World War that was far more deadly and far more costly than the first one. He will discuss the importance of the common defense from a fiscal conservative point of view. It’s not the question that I was asking these two gentlemen to address. Ahmadinejad also said anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury. That’s a different intent. People say, you look at defense, what’s the probability? So I believe in diplomacy. In the early years, the Constitutional objective of providing a common defense focused on opening the territory immediately beyond the Appalachian Mountains and negotiating a peace with the native Americans who inhabited the area. I think that’s part of how we really need to look at the defense area. The last thing I’ll say related is that, as Ken said, you cannot overstate the importance of risk to people. The idea of building in reserve capabilities is absolutely critical to the idea of defense insurance or risk management, and it’s a very important feature to understand because people will often look at things and say we’ve never needed this, we’ve got more than we need, and so on. We are now 65 years into the nuclear age, and the ominous intersection of jihadist terrorism and nuclear proliferation has been inexorably rolling towards humanity and the free world for decades. Most government spending … There is, of course, the ongoing debate about cutting the defense budget. So when we look at the defense issue, it’s important to start by saying, “What are our security needs, and what are our security obligations?” but also to ask, “What are our long-term and short-term security needs?” And how we answer that drives the budget. The phrase "provide for the common defense," which is written in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution, grants the federal government authority to maintain a military for the defense and protection of its people. They operate under a different set of rules and logic in which, as the Congressman says, diplomacy is a means to an end. To answer your question, there’s an analysis online where we did precisely that. First, why is there this debt, and why is there deficit spending? [4]See The Heritage Foundation, “A Strong National Defense: The Armed Forces America Needs and What They Will Cost,” Heritage Foundation Special Report No. An EMP attack on America would consist of a nuclear blast detonated at exo-atmospheric altitude, which would instantly generate an electromagnetic pulse over the homeland with what could be potentially devastating effect. Establishing and maintaining a national fighting force is one of the responsibilities the Framers gave to Congress in the Constitution. One, the terrorist world knows that this is a way to turn America off. It’s why we also look at not just the short term, but the long term. These are all laudable things, but they also have a huge cost attached to them, and very few people really talk about the cost in terms of what are in many cases the larger consequences. CUNNINGHAM: One intention the framers had when creating the Constitution, as you just heard in the preamble, was to “provide for the common defense.” But … We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure We’d rather spend the money on iPads and going to the movies and taking vacations in Cincinnati. But when we think of insurance, we have to think of insurance first of all in that way. The world has to understand that Sharia is not simply a set of rules governing criminal or religious behavior; it is the primary doctrinal and legal impetus for terrorism in the name of Islam. Authors: Ken Blackwell is somebody that I hold to be a hero in this republic. If you compare the risk between the two, one is bad but not catastrophic; the other is truly catastrophic. That is precisely the same when we talk about defense. Or compare that to a nuclear attack where literally tens of millions of people are killed in very short order. It is an economic crisis, as I’ve tried to demonstrate by the numbers, in terms of the anemic economic growth that we are realizing. The head of the household used to be the driver and the provider of the care for the family. The Honorable Ken Blackwell: The current situation in foreign affairs is not unlike after World War I: Americans are disillusioned, beset by high unemployment and other economic challenges. Stuart M. Butler: I totally agree with everything Ken just said. One of the reasons we failed in that regard, according to Dr. Gorka, is the misguided belief that the religious character of the enemy’s ideology should not be discussed—this despite the fact that all those who’ve brought death to our shores, al-Qaeda operatives, have done so not so much out of purely political conviction, but clearly as a result of the fact that they feel transcendentally justified. If you don’t have rule of law, predictability of action, predictability of government decision-making, you cannot have a thriving economy. There’s a real weakness there that an enemy will exploit if they get the chance. This is actually a legal maxim  –  Designato unius est exclusio alterius – meaning, “the designation of one is the exclusion of the other.”. It’s the same capability; it’s the same infrastructure you would need to intervene in Syria. We have held this month-long series for four years now to highlight the importance of national defense to the country. We also saw that we had demobilized our forces. Washington has saddled Americans with such debt that it wants to cut defense to pay for burgeoning entitlements, but we should not be forced to surrender either security or our desire for liberty to fund government largesse. [5] It requires automated hardware-based solutions to deal with any such electromagnetic pulse, whether it comes from nuclear or geomagnetic disturbance. Common Defense Common Defense. That’s vitally important, and I think we probably understand the intent of terrorists more than we ever have. To pull several things together here and try to make it sound compelling, the challenge before the free world today is to render terrorism a universally hated evil and a completely ineffective means of achieving political goals. They certainly are skeptical about the use of American power. The Honorable Trent Franks Therefore, I buy umbrella insurance because of the nature of the risk and the downside effect. You don’t get anything tangible from insurance until you need it. That didn’t mean that we didn’t look at the preparation of our police officers, our firefighters, that we didn’t look at the most efficient way that we could expend those precious finite resources to provide them with the best, most effective technology available. We spend billions of dollars hardening our military apparatus—our missile defense capability, our nuclear triad—and yet the civilian grid is as delicate as a butterfly wing to EMP. He basically said married families taking care of children best help those children develop the cognitive skills necessary for an effective military force. He serves on the House Armed Services Committee and also on the Strategic Forces Subcommittee that oversees our nuclear arsenal, our missile defenses, and U.S. military assets in space. It cannot coexist with freedom and liberty, and we must be as vigilant against this stealth jihad as we are against the military capabilities of violent jihad. So as important as I believe missile defense is—and I’m the chairman of the Missile Defense Caucus, so I believe it’s very, very important—we have to harden our grid, because we invite some sort of an EMP attack if we don’t, and there are even scenarios where potentially, if we had to engage a nuclear incoming mid-range and medium-range missile at lower altitude, we could even precipitate an EMP attack on ourselves if they fused the warhead. [5]See H.R. Some said it was really premature, because at the time, Iran only had 167 known centrifuges, and they reminded us that it takes 3,000 centrifuges to have a credible and fully capable nuclear enrichment program. It’s not sentiment; it’s just the logic of the way nations—particularly those kinds of nations—operate. It’s possible that only one such weapon, properly designed and delivered, could destroy or disable America’s electric grid and effectively return our society to the horse-and-buggy days without the horse and buggy. As anyone who studies history and diplomacy knows, that’s completely and simplistically wrong, as you pointed out, Congressman. With the new administration in place, we gave our troops their largest pay raise in eight years. The Preamble to the Constitution is an introductory, succinct statement of the principles at work in the full text. I think that’s certainly a legitimate question. What he said was that Article I, Section 8 of our Constitution is very relevant to our discussion. For Republicans or Democrats to look at defense as an expendable item because it’s easy to get through a town hall meeting if you don’t talk about Medicare but you talk about getting out of Afghanistan or cutting defense, that is not only the wrong way to look at it, but really is not the way to present to the American people the real choices and the tough decisions that we have to make to get our budget back under control and our federal government back under control. He said, “If it wasn’t for us, you’d all be writing your papers in Russian.”, There’s always been a tension within the conservative side on these sorts of issues. It’s an innovative way of thinking about this issue, but it reminded me of something else. This is nonsensical, as Madison pointed out in a letter to Edmund Pendleton dated Jan. 21, 1792. It’s not an either/or; it’s not that you can have high growth and low security; they must go together. If Iran gains nuclear capability, they will give it to terrorists the world over, and the entire human family will step into the shadow of nuclear terrorism. You don’t get anything from your life insurance until you die and your kids could be destitute. Kim R. Holmes: This is the final event in our 2012 Protect America Month. So we are very focused on how to get the personnel compensation mix right. Frankly, even among conservatives, there is some confusion about the place of the common defense in the U.S. Constitution. In the end, only a coherent conservative constitutional approach can get us to a point where we have adequate national security, abundant and accelerated economic growth, and a moral foundation that has contributed to American exceptionalism. In the debate within Washington itself around the think tank community, you get sort of an insidious argument that when you look at different parts of the federal government and you need to make changes, it’s surely appropriate to share the burden, to make similar percentage cuts across the board. The Defense Department needs to be scrutinized to see if it’s, as Stuart indicated, doing things most effectively. As veterans, we swore to protect the rights of every American. There is, as we look around the country, some confusion about how much we actually spend on defense. 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