WHO WILL DEFEND THE ONCE MIGHTY FREE WORLD?

With he election of Obama there comes many unanswered questions about just will the CHANGE he promises will bring to US Americans.
We know he has promised a form of National health care, national Service Corps with a stipend of $1800 a month for a force equal to the military we now have, and the "free-bees" list goes on.

But the big question is how will he , or I should say how will we pay, for all this largess? Will he cut the military budget to substitute welfare for defense? Or will he tax the middle class out of existence?

The reason the answer to this question is so important is that a report from JANE'S Military Report details that our once strong ally Great Britain is about to become an effete military power. The report which is excerpted in the following paragraphs illustrates that the once proud an powerful "Lion" of Great Britain has been reduced to a toothless cat.

Since 1953 when the Korean war was being fought the British Prime Ministers have drastically reduced the percentage of the Gross Domestic Product spent on defenese from 10% of GDP to a present 2.3% in 2007!
The last Prime Minister to raise the pounds Sterling that was spent on the defense of the "Realm" was Margaret Thatcher in 1982. She raised the amount from 4.1% of GDP to 5.4%, but even the strident talking friend of President Bush, Tony Blair, reduced military spending while at the same time committing forces to fight in Desert Storm that were poorly equipped to fight. Now the present administration has reduced the amount of money spent for their defense budget to 2.3% of GDP!

All this puts the strain to defend freedom of the rest of the FREE World on the U.S. of America. Will Obama and his Obama-maniacs take up the slack?

"As of August 1, 2008, the authorized strength of the British regular armed forces was slightly under 185,000, including untrained personnel. This is down 12.3 percent from 211,000 in April 1997, before Blair was elected. In 2007, only 0.9 percent of the labor force was employed by or serving in the military, compared to 1.4 percent in the U.S.

The Royal Air Force (RAF) has suffered the sharpest decline, reduced by 14,000 to slightly over 43,000 authorized. The Royal Navy has been drawn down by 7,000 to its current strength of 38,000. The Army has done the best, declining by only 5,000 to 103,000 authorized, including untrained personnel. Yet the Army has borne the brunt of the wars in the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The authorized size of the Army's Volunteer Reserves, the Territorial Army, has fallen by 42 percent from under 52,000 in 1997 to slightly over 30,000 in 2008.

The 2004 white paper Delivering Security in a Changing World: Future Capabilities called for Britain to field an Army of 102,000. Britain has already achieved that goal. As of July 2008, the Army was short 3,500 personnel, leaving it with a full-time, trained strength of 98,290. The Territorial Army is short by 10,000, leaving it 34 percent under strength. The MoD has also acknowledged that 8,500 of the 52,000 regular soldiers in deployable units are classified as unfit to serve in combat duties. Record spending on recruitment has increased the number of new recruits to the Army, but has not alleviated shortages in key areas or kept pace with outflow.

The Army, therefore, continues to shrink. In July 2008, outflow exceeded inflow by 120 officers and 540 enlisted, a reflection of the fact that in 2007- 2008 only 45 percent of Army enlisted reported that they were satisfied with life in the service.In the first six months of 2008, outflow exceeded inflow in almost every category across the services.] Outflow rates in all of the services are at or near 10-year highs. Retention bonuses have failed to stem the tide. These are unprecedented developments in time of war.

In an effort to meet its recruitment goals, the Army has recruited in foreign countries for the past five years. It is now drawn from 54 nations, primarily those in the Commonwealth. Not including the Gurkhas, approximately 7,000 soldiers, or 7 percent of the Army, have been recruited from outside Britain. These soldiers have performed bravely, and no objection can be raised to accepting volunteers from Commonwealth countries, but reliance on overseas recruitment is a dangerous form of military outsourcing that weakens the connection between the British Army and the nation.

The personnel shortfalls in all the services, especially the Army, have had a serious impact on the readiness of Britain's forces. In the last quarter of 2007-2008, 51 percent of the military reported serious weaknesses in their ability to deploy in a reasonable amount of time, up from 39 percent in 2006-2007. A further 7 percent reported critical weaknesses. The MoD's conclusion was that "the overall readiness of the force structure continued to deteriorate throughout the year."

In fact during the present Iraq war this little know fact reveals just how bad the British military has become. In late 2007, British forces, after making a secret deal with the Iranian-backed militias to allow them to depart safely, abandoned their compound in Basra for a heavily attacked airport base outside the city. As one U.S. intelligence official stated, "The British have basically been defeated in the south."

Britain returned to Basra in 2008 on the heels of Operation Charge of the Knights, conducted by Iraqi and U.S. forces. Brigadier Julian Free, commander of the British 4th Mechanised Brigade, admitted that Britain needed the "huge amount of armoured combat power" that the U.S. brought to bear because Britain "didn't have enough capacity in the air and...didn't have enough capability on the ground." Indeed, he acknowledged, Britain could no longer conduct large-scale operations on its own. This British failure, and the Iraqi and U.S. success, illustrates how the British armed forces, starved of the manpower, equipment, and political support they needed to achieve their mission, have suffered since 1997.Source: American Heritage Foundation

To put all these facts in perspective one must accept the fact that while the Free World is destroying it's military capability to pursue the Welfare state, the Communist Chinese, Communist North Koreans and the nascent Communist Russians are building -up their military capability. And to make things more ominous, the forces of militant Islam are about to develop the night mare of night mares,the NUCLEAR BOMB!!!