Failing His Sworn Duty To Protect America

When a new President is sworn into office, he takes this oath:

I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Hm. Rather plain and clear, don't you think? Then I wonder why Barack Obama is failing to do his sworn duty to protect America:

When Secretary of Defense Robert Gates went to Chicago last summer to make the case for killing the F-22 -- the world's premier air supremacy fighter and the only "fifth generation fighter" currently in production anywhere -- he argued that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter would be a more cost-effectve alternative. Though the JSF "has had development problems to be sure," Gates said, "It is a versatile aircraft, less than half the total cost of the F-22, and can be produced in quantity with all the advantages produced by economies of scale – some 500 will be bought over the next five years."

Well, not long after Gates's speech -- and the administration's successful effort to kill the F-22 -- a Pentagon study was revealed showing that the JSF program had again fallen badly behind schedule. Rather than procuring 500 planes by the summer of 2014, as Gates had predicted, the Pentagon now expects to field just one operational squadron (or 12 planes!) of F-35s by 2014. The Air Force will not have its first squadron until 2016. And that is based on an assumption that there will be no further delays in the program -- an assumption that only a fool would make.

Gates was also wrong about the cost of the F-35. Current estimates show that some variants of the F-35 will cost as much as $113 million. That's significantly more than the per unit cost of an F-22, and Gates must have known this full well even when he gave that speech saying that the JSF wasn't coming in on budget at $50 million a copy.

But the oddest thing about Gates's speech last summer was his assertion that competitors to the United States, specifically China, would be unable to produce their own fifth-gen fighters any time soon. "Consider that by 2020, the United States is projected to have nearly 2,500 manned combat aircraft of all kinds," Gates said, while "China, by contrast, is projected to have no fifth generation aircraft by 2020."

Of course the Chinese are already working on a fifth-gen fighter. Whether they will be able to produce one in any significant quantity by 2020 seemed to be a legitimate point of debate. But here was Gates saying definitively that they would not be able to do so.

Well, one year later, Gates is now singing a very different tune. In his speech over the weekend, Gates asked, "Is it a dire threat that by 2020 the United States will have only 20 times more advanced stealth fighters than China?" Thus Gates concedes that the Chinese will indeed have a stealth fighter in a decade. Some new information on Chinese fighter development must have come to light.

We know now that Gates's estimate of U.S. procurement last summer was bogus. We will be nowhere near 2,500 fifth-gen aircraft (F-35s and F-22s) by 2020. And now Gates has conceded that China will, in fact, have produced a fifth-generation stealth fighter by 2020. How many will they have produced? How many will we have produced? We can only be sure of two things: Gates doesn't know, and he killed the F-22 based on a faulty assumption that the number of Chinese stealth fighters in 2020 would be zero.

But that's not all:

Ryan Mauro, an intelligence analyst with the Asymmetric Warfare and Intelligence Center, flags this new video by the Russian company Concern Morinformsystem-Agat selling its Club-K Container Missile System.

Mauro reports:

The system allows a weak nation to strike the land and sea targets of a superior force by placing cruise missiles into any type of 40 foot container. The video uses a ship, truck and train as examples of potential launching platforms. This means that once this weapon is sold, any of these transportation vehicles have to be seen as missile pads.

…

these vehicles can cross borders, making it more difficult to identify the perpetrator of an attack and impossible to predict where an attack might come from. The missiles might from a shipping vessel off the coast or a truck that crossed via the Mexican border. With a range of 220 kilometers, or about 136 miles, they can either be fired from a safe distance from the border or the distance can be minimized by getting close to the target by being hidden.

This game-changing new threat is not new to conservatives, but the Obama administration has chosen to completely ignore it thus leaving our nation vulnerable to attack.

Once again, the United States already has a proven counter to this weapon that Russia is selling: the Airborne Laser. And, once again, the only problem here is...the Obama administration:

...since the Obama administration decided to ignore the threat from short-range missiles like the Club K, President Obama decided to kill the program. Heritage fellow James Carafano explains the consequences:

If Iran has one missile and nuclear weapon, it might have two. It could detonate one over New York in a low-altitude air burst that would kill up to a half-million and cripple Manhattan forever.

Iran could fire a second at high altitude over the mid-Atlantic states, creating an electro-magnetic pulse that would take down a large portion of the national grid and plunge Washington, D.C., into permanent darkness.

America would be crippled in a flash, with no obvious enemy at which to shoot back.

An ABL could help neutralize this threat, and others. Advancing the technology alone will give the U.S. a dramatic advantage over potential adversaries.

But if the administration has its way, we’ll see the ABL in the Smithsonian, rather than defending our coasts.

You know, I don't think he took his oath seriously! Unfortunately, it is We The People who will end up paying for it with lost lives, lost property, lost freedom, and lost prosperity. Not to sound like a perpetual chant, but these stories support my assertion that the biggest danger to America is Barack Obama.

There's my two cents.