THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Republicans are good for Defense and the military. And any time you want a laugh, just read up on the drivel these swivel chair Napoleons spout when they want to attack the Democrats. This years flavor is directed at the yoooge amount of damage done by President Obama.

Republican White House hopefuls are likely Thursday to sing what’s become a familiar dirge during every presidential debate so far: President Barack Obama has degraded the military.

Top defense analysts with combat experience, however, say that refrain is simplistic, and fails to include other parties they hold responsible for current military problems, including President George W. Bush and his predecessors, and the Pentagon itself. The missteps include failed occupations in the Middle East, super-expensive weapons systems such as the F-35 fighter jet that under-perform, and the centuries-old inability of major powers to counter insurgencies.

“Those were strategic catastrophes insofar as they squandered trillions of dollars and cost too much life and blood,” Douglas Macgregor, a retired Army colonel who helped lead the U.S. and allied victory in the first Gulf War, said of the failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“That money was diverted from useful investments in military power,” Macgregor, whose book on military misadventures will be published in June, told McClatchy. “There has been a failure to understand that occupations always ruin armies.”

“Sequestration ended up causing a lot of work stoppages and work slowdowns in maintenance facilities,” said Bryan Clark, a retired Navy commander who spent much of the 1990s on a nuclear submarine chasing Russian subs. “It caused this backlog that’s never really been caught up to.”

Ironically, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who was not in the Senate when the original sequestration measure was passed, but who threatened a government shutdown in 2013 if its spending limits were altered, has been the most forceful of the remaining Republican candidates in accusing Obama of having weakened the military.

“For seven years we’ve had a commander in chief who doesn’t believe in the mission of the military, who doesn’t stand by them, who has weakened and degraded the military in a way that has undermined readiness and made us far less able to defend ourselves,” Cruz told cheering South Carolina voters last week at a town hall in Greenville, S.C.

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who voted against sequestration as a first-year senator, also has laid into Obama.

“Today, we are on pace to have the smallest Army since the end of World War II, the smallest Navy in 100 years, the smallest Air Force in our history,” Rubio said last month during a Republican debate in Des Moines, Iowa. “You cannot destroy ISIS (the Islamic State) with a military that’s being diminished. When I’m president, we are rebuilding the U.S. military, because the world is a safer and a better place when America is the strongest military in the world.”

Experts agree that the number of sailors, soldiers, Marines and airmen has declined – to 1.3 million now from 1.4 million in 2002 – but they ascribe that decrease to what normally takes place when the U.S. ends a combat role, as happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, where almost 200,000 U.S. troops were deployed at peak levels in 2007 and 2008.

Big brave puffery about rebuilding the military usually means throwing more money at makers of junk like the Navy's Little Crappy Ships and the Air Force's F-35 Flying Brick. As for what the troops really need, fuhgeddaboutit!