Obama vs. Romney 101: 5 ways they differ on military issues

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has not been expansive regarding his views of the war in Afghanistan – perhaps because both he and President Obama do not have significantly different plans. But here are five areas where the candidates differ on military issues.

2. Defense 'sequester' cuts

Jason Reed/Reuters/File
Sean O'Keefe (l), chairman and CEO of EADS North America testifies at a House Armed Services Committee hearing on 'Sequestration Implementation Options and the Effects on National Defense: Industry Perspectives' on Capitol Hill on July 18, 2012. Alongside Mr. O'Keefe is David Hess, president of Pratt and Whitney.

The buzzword on Capitol Hill, if not on the lips of voters, has been “sequestration,” which includes mandatory cuts of more than half a trillion dollars in defense spending during the next decade if Congress can’t balance the budget by next January. 

Today, the Romney/Paul camp is firmly on the side of exempting the Pentagon from the mandatory cuts, which Congress is expected to do. The Obama administration has resisted exempting the defense budget from the cuts to give them more leverage in negotiations with their Republican counterparts, analysts say.

Yet the administration is aware that the Romney campaign will likely use sequestration as a wedge issue. “Romney will try to hang sequestration around the president’s neck,” Robert Diamond, an official on the Obama reelection campaign, told Foreign Policy magazine at a preconvention fundraiser. “That is their line of national security attack. They don’t have anything else to talk about.”

The defense cuts amount to half of the automatic spending cuts mandated by the Budget Control Act, the compromise legislation that resolved a standoff over raising the national debt limit last summer. Congress couldn’t find a formula for offsetting those reductions and so they’re slated to hit the economy come Jan. 1.

2 of 5

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.