The Nixon-Obama Debates

Many polls are predicting a big Obama-Biden win on November 4th. That being said, I'm still not convinced that an Obama-Biden administration, combined with a large, possibly super majority Democratically controlled Congress, will change America's forward deployed force structure. I hope that I am incorrect, but I do not see American soldiers being pulled out of Iraq in 16 months.

The article linked above discusses how Obama has pushed for more troops in Afghanistan with much success. The problem with this is the cost of both wars on America. We already have a broken military due to Iraq and Afghanistan and shifting forces from Iraq to Afghanistan will not fix that. In my mind, we really need to put NATO to the test on Afghanistan, force member nations to spend a certain percentage of their GDP on defense (if we are spending upwards of 4 percent, they should at least be spending 2 or 3 percent), and force them to contribute to the fight in Afghanistan by threatening to disband the alliance. Here is a link to an interesting article discussing linking defense spending to GDP: The 4 Percent Folly

While I agree that linking our defense expenditures, already too high in my mind, to a certain GDP percentage is a folly, I do not agree that it is a folly when it comes to other NATO members who average around 2 percent of their GDP spent on defense. The latest numbers I could find are linked here. Among the interesting facts: Norway - 1.9 percent, Spain - 1.2 percent, and Luxembourg, the financial services capital of the world, checking in at 0.8 percent.