Missouri Sens. Claire McCaskill and Roy Blunt are now both members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
We encourage them to speak out to their Missouri constituents on how our national security needs should be funded in the coming years.
Today our military reach is still global in nature. Must it continue to be such a force structure in the future? That is the fundamental decision to be made today.
Few would argue, we hope, that preventing a nuclear exchange in the future through nuclear deterrence remains our first and vital priority in matters of national security.
Maintaining freedom of the seas is our next priority. Ships of all nations must continue to be able to navigate in all international waters anywhere in the world. We must have the sea power to ensure such remains a constant for the coming decades. Ninety percent of all world trade goes by sea, and that is not going to change in the near future.
Those two objectives are expensive, particularly if we must fund such forces by ourselves. But we know of no other nations willing and able to bear their share of such burdens today or tomorrow. We must be prepared, on our own, to deter nuclear war and keep our seas free.
Given those objectives, the debate of how to build, operate and maintain an adequate force structure should then follow.
Do we have the economic wherewithal to “nation build” overseas with ground forces in the future?
Before Congress starts cutting defense spending, a strategic debate is needed. We hope our two senators agree with that approach and would like to hear their views on that subject, given their positions of leadership in the Senate.
Opinion
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Our View: National security
- Opinion
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Our View: Spying on us
Distrust of government secrecy has been elevated to an exceptional level with the disclosure the Justice Department covertly examined two months of Associated Press phone records to determine who leaked details to the AP about a foiled terrorist plot.
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Our View: Pass on the legacy
Forty hungry members of the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry began gathering corn at the Rader farm near the village of Sherwood when they were ambushed by a guerrilla band of about 70 Southern sympathizers.
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Our View: Big Brother looms large
The federal government, working under the cloak of secrecy, has been having a heyday at the expense of all Americans.
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Our View: Disgraceful military assault
We want to make one thing clear: A sexual assault is not a sex scandal. Nor can the rise in sexual assaults in the military be justified in any way.
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Elliott Denniston, guest columnist: Right-to-work laws only hurt workers
Middle-class workers have been fighting an uphill battle for the past 30 years.
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Your View: Food drive efforts
Branch No. 366 of the National Association of Letter Carriers along with the National Rural Letter Carriers Association, the American Postal Workers Union and the U.S. Postal Service would like to thank all the area communities that participated in the 2013 Stamp Out Hunger food drive.
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Your View: More about tax credit
The Globe’s editorial in “Our View” (May 10) may have left readers with a few inaccurate impressions.
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Other Views: Sickening disparity
Don’t feel bad if you don’t understand the wide, sometimes huge, discrepancies in fees hospitals charge for the same procedure. Or if you don’t understand the arithmetical magic the hospitals use to arrive at those fees.
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Carol Stark: America in need of more 'momisms'
Several years ago, I attended a writing workshop where one of the sessions was called “Tell it to Mom.”
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Our View: Keep learning
Donna Maus, a biology teacher from St. Mary’s Colgan High School in Pittsburg, Kan., told a group of top students, their parents and their teachers something we think everyone needs to hear.
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