Has Obama Set the Stage for Pearl Harbor All Over Again?

Here is the scenario: The U.S economy has hit the skids. Millions of Americans are unemployed. Federal stimulus programs have piled up debt but haven’t brought back jobs for most Americans. Critics charge that the stimulus funds have mostly gone to friends of the President. At the same time, the defense budget has been cut to the bone, and America’s troops have neither the weapons nor the personnel to carry out their assignments.

Sound familiar? Actually, we are describing the U.S. on Dec. 7, 1941—the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and dragged the U.S. into World War II. What can we learn from the Pearl Harbor disaster?

A lot. In FDR Goes to War, we tell how President Franklin Roosevelt spent his first seven years showering money on social welfare programs that bolstered his party’s majority. FDR showed the world how federal spending, when carefully targeted, could win elections from coast to coast. Roosevelt and his social engineers designed programs for farmers, for city dwellers, for needy youth, and especially for voters living in key battleground states.

At the same time that FDR was pouring out cash for welfare programs, he was starving the military of supplies needed to defend America. In 1935, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Douglas MacArthur said that his “hopeful” goal for the coming year was a 30-day supply of bullets for the U.S. Army. Even as America’s enemies gained strength in the late 1930s, FDR refused to arm the military for an adequate defense. By 1940, the U.S. still had fewer than 50 heavy bombers in its continental defense, few antiaircraft guns, only primitive tanks, and little ammunition for either bombers or guns.

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