Analyst's note:  Absolutely must read and carefully consider.  Think long and hard about what is now before us as we continue to face a world full of tyrants who do not want our nation to survive.  Without America, where are people going to run?

"In a parting shot by one of the nation's longest-serving Pentagon chiefs, Robert Gates on Tuesday warned that shrinking defense budgets will mean a smaller military and a diminished American role in the world.

[....] "A smaller military, no matter how superb, will be able to go fewer places and be able to do fewer things," he said in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank that is generally hostile to defense cuts.

His speech marked the culmination of a series of recent remarks in which Gates has acknowledged that the Pentagon's free-spending ways are ending, while also cautioning against budget cuts so deep as to "hollow out" the military. Warning against a temptation for the country to lower its guard and relax when threats seem less pressing, he wants his legacy to be that he steered the Pentagon toward long-term stability.

[....] "The tough choices ahead are really about the kind of role the American people - accustomed to unquestioned military dominance for the past two decades - want their country to play in the world," Gates said.

"They need to understand what it could mean for a smaller pool of troops and their families if America is forced into a protracted land war again - yes, the kind no defense secretary should recommend anytime soon, but one we may not be able to avoid." He was not specific about future conflicts, but in the past he has raised the possibility of being drawn into a war on the Korean peninsula while also facing war-or-peace decisions on Iran.

[....] defense spending as a share of national wealth is lower today than during previous big wars.

But given world circumstances and the nation's "bleak fiscal outlook," there is no prospect of returning to higher spending.

"Nor do I believe we need to," he said."

People ask almost every day, what can they do, can we still retain our liberty and freedoms?  The answer is a resounding yes, but I didn't say it would be easy. 

We have been at the edge before and we need to learn quickly what to do now.  I quote a favorite Marine Corps general who departed this world many years ago, but his words from the preface of his book "The Eleventh Hour" quoted here are just as good today as the day they were penned in 1978 or 79.

"This book is addressed primarily to the twenty-nine million Americans who have served their country in the Armed Forces and to those millions of young Americans who will have to bear the burdens of future wars. It is a call to arms, a plea to all of you to fight a battle now to prevent a war tomorrow.  Unless you respond -- both veteran and youth -- the sacrifices of the past and the promises of the future will vanish down the drain of history.

I have never asked Marines to go into battle without telling them exactly what they faced so far as I knew it.  My one unbreakable rule has always been to stick with facts and tell the truth.  That is what I am going to do in this book.

The facts are these:  the United States has been brought, by its own civilian leaders, to a position of military inferiority to the Soviet Union [add the enemy of your choice in 2011].  At this moment, you  and your loved ones stand exposed to physical destruction.  The option of whether you shall live or die rests primarily with the hardened men who occupy the Kremlin [think the worldwide theocracy of Islam under sharia law with the caliph as a ruler now being led by Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, the welfare socialist state with the government as the ruler, and the one world government movement of George Soros and his ilk with their oligarchy as the rulers in 2011 -- they are currently working together to destroy America as we know it].  If they should choose tomorrow or next year or the year after to annihilate you and your family, there is little the U.S. government could do to stop them except to surrender.

No generation of Americans has ever before been so recklessly placed at the mercy of so pitiless and powerful an enemy.  What's worse is that at this moment of greatest danger the men who are responsible for having placed us in the kill zone are still calling the shots in Washington.

There are no incoming missiles in our skies because the Soviet leaders believe that with patience they can in a short time force us to surrender.  I am not talking about some date in the far distant future, but some day within the next four or five years.  Their ultimatum, when it comes, will place on the shoulders of our leaders the terrible decision to fight a thermonuclear war we cannot win or to hand over the American people to an oligarchy of tyrants who whose viciousness and brutality have no match in the long, bloody history of man's cruelty.  As Ernest Hemingway wrote at the beginning of World War II, there are several things worse than war and they all come with defeat.

For thirty-four years I proudly wore the uniform of the Marine Corps.  I fought the Japanese, the North Koreans, the Chinese, the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong with every ounce of energy God gave me.  For thirty-four years mine was a world of war and arms, of command, and obedience, of unquestioned loyalty, and support of the Constitution.  Politics was foreign to that world.

But I have learned as well as bled.  I have learned that the successes bought at such dear prices in lives on the battlefields are made necessary by the failures in the political arena at home.  I have learned that wrong thinking, carelessness, greed and apathy kill and maim, too.  I am asking you to combat these weaknesses in our politics lest they once more unlease the dogs of war.

Our loyalty to the Constitution must remain firm, but we must battle in the political arena with the same unity, the same ferocity, and the same determination which has carried us to victory on the battlefield.  I am asking you, not to destroy but to build, not to kill but to preserve life, not to enslave but to maintain freedom.  I am asking your actions be motivated, not by hatred, but by  love for all the good things in this world which must be saved from harm.

I cannot lead you in this battle.  The accumulated years are too many, and I have no expertise in this kind of combat.  There are younger men, perhaps you, who have the energy and the knowledge to assume command.

What I can do I will do.  I can lay out the danger, identify the enemy, and suggest a plan of action which each of you can follow.  The objectives are these:  1. to purge the Congress of the forces of appeasement and surrender which are pulling us toward war or slavery; and 2. replace them with men and women of integrity and common sense who will restore our military superiority, the only coin with which we can buy the time for diplomacy to work.

The destiny of the American people belongs in our hands, not in the hands of foreign tyrants.  Will you join me in the fight to return it to our shores?

GEN. LEWIS WALT, USMC"