Readers Respond to Leaner Defense Spending

Washington Post, January 8, 2012 | Letter

By Melvin A. Goodman

If The Post is going to use President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s maxims to challenge President Obama’s “strategic guidance” on defense spending [“A reduction in force,” editorial, Jan. 7], then perhaps the editorial should have cited his maxims that suggest the current president is on the right track. Regarding the need for fiscal austerity, Eisenhower noted in his “cross of iron” speech that “every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in a final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed — those who are cold and are not clothed.” As Eisenhower indicated, the United States is not spending money alone on its arsenal, it is ”spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

Melvin A. Goodman, Bethesda