Exclusive: Tim Daughtry takes skeptical look at Navy's slogan, military's stretch --WND

A global force for whose good?

Posted: April 14, 2011
1:00 am Eastern
By Tim Daughtry
© 2011

Do you remember when you decided that the mission of the U.S. military was to be the police force for the "international community"? Or do you remember the arguments that finally persuaded you that we should borrow money from other nations, despite our ruinous levels of national debt, in order to pay for the privilege of protecting those other nations?

If you do not, then you are among the millions of mainstream Americans who assume that the purpose of our military is to protect our people and our national interests. Not to spread democracy. Not to intervene in the civil wars of other nations. Not to take out tyrants who pose no threat to us. And most definitely not to incur those costs even as our nation careens toward a financial wreck the severity of which the world has not yet seen.

Even so, Obama has now committed our thinly stretched military to a third war. Of course, we are reminded that the U.S. is not acting unilaterally, that there are other countries intervening in the Libyan civil war. Thus, the "international community" has decided that the Libyan regime is a problem.

This argument in favor of intervention is not convincing. If the purpose of our military is to protect American interests, then the support of other nations is nice from a practical point of view, but it is not a deciding factor. We would expect our military to be used to protect American interests with or without the approval of other nations.

On the opposing side, we hear the valid concern that we might be fighting al-Qaida on the other two wars and then protecting them in Libya. But even that valid concern misses deeper and more serious issues about our sovereignty: Whose interests are being served by our military?

In this context, the current ad campaign for our Navy strikes an especially dissonant chord. The ads cite the medical services and food delivery by the U.S. Navy around the world even as we fight three hot wars. The website carries the slogan "America's Navy: A Global Force for Good."

Granted, today's military needs to market itself to attract recruits, and that means using catchy slogans. And granted, at least the website does refer to wars that have been fought on our nation's behalf and the need for American superiority on the seas, aspects of the mission that make sense. And few would criticize using our military to help others harmed by earthquakes and other natural disasters.

But still, something about that slogan should raise eyebrows in light of the obvious mission creep we are witnessing. Does "global" refer to our ability to reach out and touch our enemies anywhere around the globe? If so, let me apologize now for even raising the issue. But if that were the case, it seems the rest of the slogan would suggest in some way that we have a global force that you don't want to mess with, instead of a global force for some undefined "good."

Or does "global" have another meaning, one that implies that the mission of our military is to support the interests of the global community? We can perhaps be forgiven for raising the question when we see Obama's recent concern for Brazil's ability to drill for oil and his obvious lack of concern for our own, or the left's constant insistence that we surrender our sovereignty to the U.N.

It is particularly odd that many of today's leftists who would use our military in the interest of the international community are the ideological descendants of earlier leftists who challenged American intervention to halt the spread of communism. But now they support shedding American blood and bleeding the American taxpayer in the service of causes other than America's safety and interests.

At a time that the left insists that the federal budget can only be trimmed a bit here and there even as our deficits are in the trillions of dollars, we would be more than justified to look at the purpose and cost of our military commitments. In addition to our hot wars in the Middle East, we have bases all over the world. Why do we have military bases all over Europe? Whose security are we protecting? Against whom?

It is especially sobering that Obama reminds those in power in the Middle East and Africa that they should listen to the voices of their people even as he and the leftists in Congress routinely ignore the voices of our own people. Something just doesn't add up.

Just when did American citizens demand that our military become a global police force?

And just who is the dispatcher?

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