You know that annoying guy at work who swoops in at the 11th hour to take credit for the project you’ve been working on for weeks? That guy is Senator Bennet. It says a lot when Senator Bennet posts his top ten priorities on his official website, and national defense doesn’t even make the list. This matters when your state is home to one of the largest Army bases in the world, Ft. Carson, which just escaped massive troop cuts this week.
While Senator Bennet limped into the arena in the bottom of the ninth by signing on to a joint letter to the Secretary of Defense a week prior to an announcement of the latest round of sequestration cuts, Republican U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn has been passionately fighting against troop cuts in Colorado for years. As a member of the Armed Services Committee, he has been a tireless advocate to defend U.S. troop levels since President Obama’s first day in office. And make no mistake, Obama was targeting the military for cuts from day one. Clearly, he was not going to hold back on welfare and other entitlement growth.
But, now, Senator Bennet can breath a sigh of relief that Ft. Carson came out relatively untouched, thanks to long-term efforts by Lamborn and leaders at the Military Affairs Council of the Regional Business Alliance down in Colorado Springs.
While Lamborn noted that this week’s expected troop reduction announcement spared much of the Colorado community from a direct economic impact, he expressed concern regarding the broader vision of reducing the Army to pre-WWII levels. This vast reduction compromises our ability to carry out the nation’s foreign policy objectives and protect our interests at home and abroad – a concept that Senator Bennet fails to grasp.
Cutting the Army by 40,000 troops this year is the wrong answer in the face of a recalcitrant North Korea, expansionist Russia, a nuke-seeking Islamic government in Iran, terrorists holding vast amounts of territory in Iraq and Syria, and international criminal organizations involved in everything from human trafficking to cyberattacks on critical U.S. infrastructure.
Senator Bennet simply doesn’t get it.