Republican National Convention delegates plan to approve a new platform today that advocates robust military spending–while touting aircraft, Navy ship, and missile defense needs–without setting specific goals for the size of the Pentagon budget.
The convention’s Platform Committee endorsed an early version of the document–a broad expression of the Republican party’s policy views on sundry matters–on Aug. 21, ahead of this week’s convention in Tampa. A draft of the platform’s section on foreign policy and defense, which was circulated around Washington over the weekend, shows few concrete details on military spending.
The platform document’s defense-related section, dubbed “American Exceptionalism,” warns of the “dangers of a hollow force” if so-called sequestration cuts of $500 billion to the defense budget over the next decade start next year. However, the paper dated Aug. 24 does not advocate a specific path for avoiding or replacing the cuts, which many Democrats and Republicans in Congress want to prevent.
The draft platform also, notably, does not call for setting defense spending at 4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in the coming years. Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said, in an October 2011 whitepaper, he wanted to maintain a floor of 4 percent of GDP spending on “funds devoted to the fundamental military components of personnel, operations and maintenance, procurement, and research and development.” Yet, since then, his campaign has moved away from that pledge, calling the 4 percent level more of a rough goal to aspire toward. The platform that the Republican National Convention delegates will vote on today includes no such set funding goal.
Still, the document does blatantly advocate for robust military spending.
“The Republican party is the advocate for a strong national defense as the pathway to peace, economic prosperity, and the protection of those yearning to be free,” it says. Former Missouri Sen. Jim Talent, co-chairman of the Platform Committee’s foreign policy and defense subpanel, last week described the document as asserting that “the policy of the United States is peace through strength,” which is derived in party “by maintaining robust American capabilities.” Talent advises Romney on national-security matters.
The draft platform charges President Barack Obama’s administration has “responded with weakness” to national-security threats including transnational terrorism and North Korea and Iran’s nuclear-weapons efforts. The document seeks to blame Obama for the real and potential defense budget cuts brought about by the Budget Control Act of 2011, which both parties in Congress approved before Obama signed it into law.
The draft asserts: “We must immediately employ a new blueprint for a National Military Strategy that is based on an informed and validated assessment of the potential threats we face, one that restores as a principal objective the deterrence using the full-spectrum of our military capabilities.” To deter aggression from “nation-states,” it says, “we must maintain military and technical superiority through innovation while upgrading legacy systems including aircraft and armored vehicles.”
All GOP convention delegates are slated to receive a hard copy of the final platform document today, when the Republican party’s presidential nominating kicks off in earnest in Florida. The multi-day gathering officially began yesterday, but the start of events were pushed back today because of the approach of Tropical Storm Isaac.
The defense-related section of the draft platform includes some specifics on weapon systems. It cites concerns about plans to decommission six Air Force tactical squadrons, divest in the C-27 transport aircraft, and eliminate 27 C-5As and 65 C-130s. It faults proposals to retire seven Navy cruisers and slow work on amphibious ships and submarines.
“These plans limit our strategic flexibility in an increasingly dangerous world,” the document asserts. It alleges Obama is “repeating the disastrous cuts of the post-Vietnam era” and putting the nation in danger of having a “hollow force.”
The document further asserts that the Obama administration has “systematically undermined America’s missile defense, abandoning the missile defense bases in Poland and the Czech Republic, reducing the number of planned interceptors in Alaska, and cutting the budget for missile defense.”
The draft Republican platform also devotes a section to “A Twenty-First Century Threat: The Cybersecurity Danger.” It calls for the government and private sector to work together more closely to address cyber threats to the United States, help the flow of information between network managers, and encourage innovation in cybersecurity.
It charges the Obama administration’s cybersecurity-related “laws and policies undermine what should be a collaborative relationship and put both the government and private entities at a severe disadvantage in proactively identifying potential cyberthreats.”