"Brown, Dale - Warrior Class" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Dale)

"Bob, remember when we first talked about the possibility of doing this?" Thorn asked, his ever-present smile warm with the memories. Robert Goff had been one of Jeffersonian Party candidate Thomas Thorn's earliest and strongest supporters, giving up his seat in Congress during the campaign to help Thorn. They had been close friends ever since.
"Of course I remember," Goff said, smiling in spite of himself. Thomas Thorn had this irritating way of disarming almost any agitated situation or person. "But we were young and stupid and naive as hell back then."
"It was less than a year ago, funny man," Thorn said with a smile. "We were in Abilene, Texas, at one of the first Jeffersonian Party rallies. It was cold, and I think it had snowed the night before. You and three of your volunteers had to stay in the same room at the Holiday Inn because we barely had enough money to keep going for another month; Amelia and I had three of the kids licking stamps for the mailers while they were watching cartoons. We didn't even place in the Iowa caucuses, and we barely qualified for the ballot in the New Hampshire primary, so we decided to work on the Super Tuesday states. You hoped that a hundred folks would show. Our podium at the open house at the Army post was a real honest-to-goodness soapbox-"
"A bunch of cases of laundry detergent from the mess hall, covered over with a tablecloth."
Thorn nodded. "But two thousand folks showed up, and we had to stand on top of a bus and use one of those big loudspeakers they use on firing ranges to make ourselves heard."
"I remember, Thomas," Goff said. "That was the beginning. The turning point. What a day. We ended up winning New Hampshire without hardly setting foot in the state."
"But remember when we took that tour-of the base, and we saw all those hundreds of M I Abrams tanks lined up in the marshaling area?" Thorn went on. "Rows and rows and rows of them, as far as you could see, like furrows in a freshly plowed field. And they told us that none of those tanks had ever fired a shot in anger. They had second- and third-generation tanks there that had never even left the base except for training exercises. We saw artillery pieces, armored personnel carriers,
mobile bridges, tents, vans, support vehicles, Humvees, rocket launchers, even radar systems and air defense missile batteries-all had not been used
since Desert Storm, if they had ever been used at all."
"I know, Thomas," Goff said. "But we've been at peace since Desert Storm. It doesn't mean they won't ever be used. . . ." "We talked about what an incredible waste of resources it all
represented," Thorn went on. "Unemployment in the United States is at an all-time low and has been for years. Companies are begging for qualified, trainable workers. Yet we are spending billions of dollars on weapon systems that may never be used in combat, weapons that were designed to fight yesterday wars. Someone has to operate that equipment, train others to use it, maintain it, train the maintainers, and someone has to keep track of all the stuff they need to operate and maintain it. It was a huge infrastructure, a massive investment in manpower and resources, and for what? What purpose did it serve? We said it was senseless, and we wondered what we could do about it. Well, this is what we're going to do about it." The President looked at General Venti. "What are your final thoughts, General?"
Venti thought about his response for a moment, then: "We can argue the merits of the numbers, sir," he replied. "The Army spends five point three billion dollars a year on readiness and training for weapon systems that have never been used in war. The Navy spends ten billion dollars a year manning, equipping, and maintaining a fleet of nuclear attack submarines that have never fired a shot in combat. We spend another twenty billion dollars maintaining a nuclear deterrence force, and we hope to God we never have to use it, despite the threat from China and possibly Russia."
"It's the emotional factor that'll be hard to counter, Mr. President," Goff inteijected. "There are still lots of World War Two, Korea, and Vietnam vets out there who will see this plan as a betrayal of trust. Your political opponents will use that. Several previous administrations made such drastic budget cuts that what you are about to do is inevitable, but you will still be blamed for it.
"There is still a great threat out there, Mr. President," Goff








went on. "China has already attacked American territory with nuclear weapons, and we think they will again. Although every prediction model and every analyst thinks it's unlikely, former empires such as Japan, Germany, and Russia could rise up and threaten American interests. Nonaligned, theocratic, and rogue nations could threaten American interests at any time with attacks ranging from simple kidnappings to cyberforce to nuclear weapons. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction has increased tenfold since the breakup of the Soviet Union."
"I want to hear from the general, Bob," the President said. He nodded, urging him to speak. Goff looked frustrated and a bit angry, but held his comments.
"Frankly, sir, I think it's about time we start thinking about fighting future wars on our terms," the Air Force general said. "In a time of relative peace, this is the time to prepare for twenty-first- and even twenty-second century wars. We must do away with the old equipment, the old tactics, and the old fears and prejudices.
"This nation also somehow got sidetracked in its thinking about the role of the military," Venti concluded. "The military has always been a place to send kids that lacked discipline, but in more recent years the military has become a sort of extension of the welfare state. Fighting and possibly dying for your country took a back seat to learning a trade, getting an education, and providing someplace cool to go after high school. We are spending millions of dollars a year to recruit kids to join, but they're joining for all the wrong reasons. The problem is not that we lack well-qualified recruits-the problem is, the military became too big, too bloated. We had a military looking for a reason for existence. We were dreaming up missions for the military that had little to do with national security and everything to do with political posturing. I think it's time we stop that."
"Spoken like a true Air Force officer, one whose career and retirement are secure," the President said, with an inquisitive smile.
"And the Air Force makes out pretty well in the new plan,
I've noticed," Goff added. "The Air Force and Navy should be thrilled about their new status."
"I'm speaking as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, not just as an Air Force officer, sir," Vend said to Goff. "I think the plan is a good beginning. It signals a positive change in military strategy for the twenty-first century.
It's a change that I feel is badly needed. I'm completely behind the President."
"But what will your men say when the changes happen? What will your sister services say?"
"The true soldiers will do what they're told," Venti said honestly. "The rest will squawk. They'll call you a traitor. They'll call for your resignation, perhaps try to impeach you. That's when you need to show them the strength of your convictions. Will the public outcry be louder than what your heart is telling your head? If you can listen to your heart while the storm of public and world opinion is beating down on you, everything will turn out okay. That's your dilemma, sir, not mine." Venti sighed, looked away for a moment, then added, "And as for my career and retirement: they may be secure, but I'll still be forever known as the man who presided over the biggest shakeup in U.S. military history since the draft."
"At least you're okay with this," Thorn said. Venti looked sternly at his commander-in-chief, even after the President gave him a wink. To the Secretary of State, Edward Kercheval, the President went on, "Okay, Ed, I know you've been waiting for a crack at me. Fire away."
"You know how I feel about this plan, sir," Kercheval said ominously. Unlike Goff and most others in Thorn's administration, Edward Kercheval, former ambassador to Russia in the Martindale administration and a career State Department employee, was not a close friend of the President's. But the President insisted on open dialogue and direct communication between the Cabinet officers and the Oval Office, and Kercheval had made it clear early on that he would take every opportunity to do so. "I'm afraid this plan will undermine our entire foreign policy structure. Hundreds, if not thousands, of programs, agreements, letters of understanding and memoranda on hundreds of issues and topics, from diplomatic agreements to aviation to intelligence listening posts to food








shipments, rely in part on security guarantees put in place decades ago. Your plan threatens to destroy all of those protocols."
"And we're bound to abide by these agreements," the President asked, "even if I feel they're harmful to the nation?" "Those agreements are contracts, Mr. President," Kercheval