PATHETIC – Reader Joseph J. Gallick alerts us to an important piece in The Wall Street Journal.  We watch our enemies laugh at us, and ignore our thinned-out threats.  And this is what they see when they do a hard assessment of the United States:

Americans may be war-weary after Iraq and Afghanistan. But the world is still a hostile place, and the U.S.Navy is stretched too thin. And in a new sleight of hand, the Obama administration has changed what it considers a warship when reporting the size of the Navy's "battle force." From now on it will include the two hospital ships, Mercy and Comfort, 10 small coastal patrol vessels and a high-speed transport. Add those, subtract a few minesweepers, and voilà—the Navy fleet has grown to 293 from 283 ships.

Most of the new additions are lightly armed coastal-patrol craft and not true oceangoing ships. Originally designed to carry Navy SEALs and other special-operations forces, these 179-foot ships turned out to be inadequate for that role. Instead, armed with machine guns, they can be used to support "low intensity conflicts." They were launched in the early 1990s and recalled in 2010 to deal with fatigue damage to their hulls. Their military role is questionable and they're well past their expiration date, yet they sail on for public-relations purposes.

The Navy takes great pride in its humanitarian relief work, and its recruiting commercials feature photos of tsunami and earthquake survivors receiving food, water and medical care delivered by aircraft carriers, amphibious command ships, and of course, the two hospital ships. Such soft power diplomacy is an essential part of our foreign-policy strategy.

But substituting hospital ships, a former car ferry (which the Navy itself refers to as a noncombatant) and over-the-hill coastal craft for capital ships is delusional when calculating the battle force. So is the boast that the U.S. Navy has an 11 aircraft-carrier fleet.

Last month I was flown onto the USS Carl Vinson while its crew conducted training exercises about 150 miles off San Diego in the Pacific. Commissioned in 1982, the Vinson is one the Navy's oldest nuclear-powered carriers. In a briefing before the flight to the carrier, I asked how many carriers the Navy had deployed world-wide that day, and how many it could deploy within 30 days. A Naval officer said three were deployed that day, and one more could get under way within a month—a far cry from the 11-carrier fleet mandated by Congress.

COMMENT:  This is especially painful because the Navy needs more lead time to prepare for combat than any other service.  It takes years to build a capital ship.  And our shipbuilding capacity has diminished substantially since World War II.

Obama doesn't care.  The left wing of the Democratic Party, like the old "progressives," believes we are the problem, and that the Pentagon is the heart of the problem.  Distinguished novelist and major-league whackjob Toni Morrison said in a commencement address at Wellesley College in the late 90s that the American military was "out of control."  I hadn't noticed.  It's the left, and its allies in the press and the universities, that's out of control.

March 21, 2014