Tommy Vietor has previously defended Qassem Soleimani. On Wednesday, Vietor joined that inauspicious record to a provision of masterful hypocrisy.
The former chief spokesperson for President Barack Obama’s National Security Council did so with this tweet.
The WH and DOD should’ve been readying the Comfort months ago. What a massive failure of planning. https://t.co/2UpcUOQJsR
— Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) March 18, 2020
I’m sorry, but any former Obama national security official who criticizes others about force readiness is not being very honest.
By withholding defense spending as leverage for even higher domestic spending, the Obama administration hollowed out the military during its second term. Officials like Vietor didn’t just preside over greatly reduced force readiness, they refused to reduce the military’s mission requirements as they did so. That made the situation a perfect storm, especially for the Navy.
Consider then-Chief of Naval Operations Jonathan Greenert’s testimony to Congress back in February 2015.
“Our combatant commanders require three carrier strike groups and three amphibious ready groups ready to deploy within 30 days to respond to a major crisis; however, on average, we have been able to keep only one carrier strike group and one amphibious ready group in this readiness posture.”
Greenert had no hesitation in explaining why that was such a crisis. “The overall impact of budget shortfalls in the past three years has manifested in the continued decline of our relative warfighting advantages in many areas.” This, he added, “means longer timelines to arrive, less time to prevail, if we do, more ships and aircraft out of action when in battle, more sailors, Marines, and merchant mariners killed.”
But what makes Vietor’s lack of self-awareness even more ridiculous here is that the Obama administration’s spending restraints had been an obvious problem for two years before Greenert uttered those words and continued for two years afterward!
Had the United States been forced into a conflict with China or Russia during that period, we would have had a major problem. Indeed, we would probably have lost a war in the South China Sea.
Trump has vastly improved this situation. While the Pentagon continues to face a very serious military challenge from China, in particular, the Trump administration’s defense spending increases have put the Navy in a much stronger position. This is newly critical in that the military needs all the readiness flexibility it can get, expecting personnel to become infected by the coronavirus.
So, yeah, Vietor has some gall to suggest the Obama administration would have had the Navy in a better coronavirus-readiness position.
