On October 1962, destroyers from the Second Fleet streamed out to intercept Russian vessels suspected of delivering missiles to Cuba. Under the shadow of DEFCON 2, Vice Admiral Alfred Ward, commander of the Second Fleet, watched over a blockade of Cuba. The Navy men putting Russian ships under their guns knew that they were the tip of the spear in what might at any moment become the next world war.
The Russians had ordered their ships to keep going. It was up to the Second Fleet to hold the line.
“Admiral, it looks as though this is up to the Navy,” President Kennedy told Admiral Anderson.
“Mr. President,” the admiral replied, “the Navy will not let you down.”
On September 2011, under the leftist politico whose admirers tried to sell him as another JFK, the flag of the Second Fleet was taken down. The fleet that had taken point against the Russians was no more.
The justification for the disestablishment of the Second Fleet was the diminished threat from Russia. The Navy was being cut to pieces while Obama focused on boondoggles like the “Green Fleet”.
“Our Navy is smaller now than any time since 1917,” Mitt Romney had objected next year during a presidential debate. “We also have fewer horses and bayonets,” Obama sneered, to the cheers of the media. “The question is not a game of Battleship where we’re counting ships.”
When Romney brought up the Russian threat, Obama sneered some more. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”
These days, Obama’s party is mired in a haze of Russian paranoia. But it was their leader who dismantled our first lines of defense and Trump who is restoring our military deterrence.
Seven years after Obama shuttered the Second Fleet, its flag is flying again. The fleet isn’t green any more, it is mean. And it will watch over the East Coast and the Atlantic to checkmate Russian subs.
The shutdown of the Second Fleet was part of Obama’s failed pivot to Asia which ended with a humiliating apology to China for flying a plane too close to one of the Communist dictatorship’s fake South China Sea islands. (Trump has since dispatched B-52s, outraging China, with no apology.)
That was December 2015.
On January 2016, the complete collapse of naval credibility led Iran to seize two United States Navy boats, steal classified information, hold their crews hostage and humiliate them on television.
Obama had forced the Navy to grovel to China. Why not Iran?
Instead of taking decisive action against this second Iran hostage crisis, the appeasement administration instead used it to spin the success of the Iran Deal. The humiliation of the Navy was complete.
But the humiliation of the United States Navy and the United States of America ended on Jan 20, 2017.
The restoration of the Second Fleet is an important step in the revival of America’s Navy. But the full scope of the harm Obama inflicted on our readiness will take generations of hard work to repair.
The USS Enterprise, the descendant of a fabled history stretching back to the American Revolution, which took part in the Cuban blockade, was scrapped by Obama. The Enterprise was one of six carriers scrapped by Obama who wasn’t interested in counting ships or horses and bayonets.
Or in fulfilling the congressional mandate to maintain at least eleven aircraft carriers at all times. Scrapping the USS Enterprise took us to ten even though 10 U.S. Code § 5062 specifically states, “The naval combat forces of the Navy shall include not less than 11 operational aircraft carriers.”
Obama broke the law. He undermined our national security. And once again, he got away with it.
Read the full story from Front Page Mag
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