National Defense

American Syndicate is fighting to assure our continued freedom and safety from outside forces that wish to harm The United States, our way of life, and the liberty and freedoms our Constitution guarantees American citizens. We must continue to build and fund our physical military force, as well as add resources to expand our cyber security efforts. One of our priorities is enhanced funding for the healthcare of our military heroes.

For the past 70 years the USA has played an important role in world affairs. We have led a global effort to maintain and defend an international order and balance of power that have expanded security and prosperity, while supporting freedom in America and around the world. This has required all elements of our national influence—diplomacy, coalition building, trade agreements, and stabilizing monetary values–most importantly, we have a strong U.S. military that projects power globally to deter conflict and war, and when necessary, defeat America’s adversaries. We actively engage with the world because it benefits America and is in our national interest.

Over the last decade, even though we continue to need increased support, we have slowed the pace of funding and allowed some aspects of our national defense to weaken. Understanding how this has occurred is central to understanding how we can fix it. In 2011, Congress passed the Budget Control Act (BCA) with the goal of decreasing federal spending and reducing the expanding national debt. This legislation capped discretionary spending, in an effort to reduce it by $1 trillion over ten years. Because our national defense is such a large part of the U.S. budget, almost half of all the cuts were applied to defense.

The BCA tasked a “super committee,” comprised of members of Congress from each party, with crafting a deal to reduce the federal spending by finding cuts to the mandatory costs of entitlement programs, such as Medicare and Social Security.

Our position is that the defense of our nation is only as important as what we are defending.

The BCA contained what many thought would be an incentive to reach agreement: If the super committee failed, an additional $1.2 trillion of cuts over ten years would be mandated—again, with half of those cuts falling on defense. This was sequestration, a large automatic cut that was assumed to be so destructive and unthinkable that it would force agreement on mandatory spending reform.

Sen. John McCain believes, “The damage that has been done to our military over the past eight years will not be reversed in one year. Just stemming the bleeding caused by recent budget cuts will take most of the next five years, to say nothing of the sustained increases in funding required thereafter.” (Click here to read Sen. McCain’s platform paper Restoring American Power)