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As Nathan Bedford Forrest Said, "A Foolish Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds"

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Spencer handles the general idiocy of the Donnelly-Schmitt op-ed on the Gates defense budget...

Schmitt and Donnelly argue for a continuation of most of the programs Gates is cutting, and do so through some curious omissions and outright misstatements. The alternative to the F-22 Raptor jet is apparently “the 660 F-15s flying today, but which are literally falling apart at the seams from age and use” — not the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that Gates and the generals are actually advocating as a replacement. Stopping the Army’s Future Combat Systems vehicle-modernization program means “future generations of soldiers will conduct mounted operations in the M1 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles designed in the 1970s,” even though Gates said on Monday that he’s going to “reevaluate the requirements, technology and approach and then re-launch the Army’s vehicle modernization program.” And Gates is somehow “cap[ping] the size of the U.S. ground force,” even though Gates is seeking an extra $11 billion to expand the Army and Marine Corps. (I suppose, to be charitable, they could mean they want an even larger ground force, but that’s hardly clear from the op-ed, which implies that Gates is resisting the very expansion he’s funding.)

…and so I’d like to concentrate on a rather small point. Donnelly-Schmitt:

More often it rewards those who arrive on the battlefield “the fustest with the mostest,” as Civil War Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest once put it. If Mr. Gates has his way, U.S. forces will find it increasingly hard to meet the Forrest standard.

Some have suggested a certain impropriety in quoting one of the founders of the KKK, but whatever; if you’re quoting specifically on military issues, then Forrest is a reasonable authority. The more serious issue is that Forrest, of course, said nothing of the sort. A casual glance at his wikipedia page would have revealed this. Now, while you can hardly expect AEI hacks to have even the most tenuous grasp on history, you do sort of wish that the Wall Street Journal would have dome some elementary fact-checking. Then again, it was the editorial page…

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