They're baaaack

From The New York Times:

MOSCOW, Saturday, Aug. 18 — President Vladimir V. Putin said Friday that the Russian Air Force would begin regular, long-range patrols by nuclear-capable bombers over the world’s oceans, resuming the practice after a 15-year hiatus in another sign of Russia’s growing assertiveness.

In the first flight, 14 bombers and six supporting airplanes took off at midnight on Friday, Mr. Putin said, in remarks carried on state television. Mr. Putin said such patrols would continue “from this day on.”

The sortie on Friday included Tu-160 and Tu-95 airplanes, known by their NATO appellations as Blackjacks and Bears, according to a statement posted on the Russian Defense Ministry Web site.

The Russian bombers were flying Friday over the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the North Pole, and were being escorted by NATO fighter jets, the site said, recalling the standoffs of the cold war.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia would periodically send its aging bomber fleet on missions, but only during major military training exercises; the country was too poor to fly the planes often.

That is no longer the case. Now the bombers will regularly fly missions far from Russian soil separately from scheduled training exercises. Mr. Putin suggested Friday that the decision was a response to military threats to Russia.

This month, Russian bombers flew near the American military base on the Pacific island of Guam. Gen. Pavel V. Androsov, the commander of long-range aviation, boasted that the sortie prompted the United States to scramble fighter jets that flew so close to the Russians that the pilots “smiled at each other and then peacefully went their separate ways.”

The Pentagon confirmed that Russian airplanes had been spotted but said that no fighter jets had been sent to intercept them.

In July, Russian Tu-95 bombers flew toward Scotland but turned back before entering British airspace. In that case, the Royal Air Force confirmed that it had scrambled fighter jets in response.

The Cold War didn't end, it just took a brief vacation.

The Clinton administration's decision to wring a "peace dividend" out of the implosion of the Soviet Union by making draconian cuts in the US armed services will be seen by historians as the most monumental blunder by any president in US history.

Everything that has happened since Soviet communism made its final journey to that unmarked graveyard of discarded lies has shown that as long as human nature remains unchanged the world will be a dangerous place. As the unfortunate Dr. Petit found out those who have something which might be desired by evil men will not have it for long unless steps are taken to protect it.

The rise of Islamism which seeks to bring the entire world into a medieval caliphate and is willing to shed an ocean of innocent blood to do so. The emergence of China as a nuclear armed economic superpower whose ambition is to become a military superpower as well. And then kick the US out of Asia and challenge us across the entire globe. The return of dictatorial government to Russia. A Russia whose abandonment of communist economics gives them the hope of actually being able to finance their aggression with real money. All of these things tell us that America is a nation at risk in a dangerous world.

America needs to find a balance between the small highly trained professional military optimized for short-duration deployments like the first Gulf War and the massive leviathan set up to wage long term total war like we had in WWII.

America does not need to keep 16 million men under arms as we did in the Second World War, but we do need a large enough military that we can handle the occupation of Iraq without the men having to do two tours in rapid succession and without having to extend the deployments of people already over there again and again.