 "U.S. Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz speaks at a campaign event at the Adventure Christian Community in Davenport, Iowa. Photo: Reuters")
Republican presidential hopeful and Texas Senator Ted Cruz has called for a massive expansion of the US military, saying its current size is far below than what is needed to keep America safe.
"President (Barack) Obama has proposed reducing the regular Army to 450,000. I think that is far below what is needed to keep this country safe. I intend to increase it to a minimum of 525,000 soldiers," Cruz, 45, told a CNN town hall in South Carolina yesterday.
Noting that the Air Force has been reduced to about 4,000 planes, he said the US needs to increase it to a minimum of 6,000 planes so that America can project power, and use its air power superiority. On the Navy, the current fleet of 272 ships is the lowest since 1917.
"Literally a century ago was the last time we had a navy with this few ships. We need to increase that to a minimum of 350 ships. We need an overall force level of 1.4 million troops at a minimum.
"We need to dramatically expand missile defence as we see asymmetric threats, rogue nations, we need to be able to defend ourselves. We need to expand cyber defence," Cruz said.
The Texas Senator, who is currently running behind front runner Donald Trump in polls except for the latest one which was released yesterday, also called for a change in America's foreign policy.
"We also need to focus our foreign policy and military policy on identifying and defeating the real enemies. I have got strong disagreements with the mistakes of the Obama- Clinton foreign policy the last seven years. One perfect example is Libya," Cruz said.
He said that President Obama and Hillary Clinton led the world in toppling the government in Libya and sadly they were supported by more than a few establishment Republicans, including several who are running for President. That has proven to be a catastrophic mistake.
"Toppling the Libyan government meant that we handed that country to radical Islamic terrorists. It is now a chaotic war zone where ISIS and other radical Islamic terrorists pose an acute national security threat to this country. It led directly to failures of the Obama-Clinton foreign policy, led directly to the tragedy of Benghazi," Cruz said.
He said that rather than engaging in trying to topple governments in the Middle East and nation build, I think the focus of the military needs to be defending this country, protecting the US' national security interests.
"Instead of getting in the middle of civil wars, we ought to be focusing on the enemies of America. We ought to be utterly destroying ISIS. We ought to be using overwhelming airpower, we ought to be arming the Kurds, we ought to be using the tools we have to utterly, and completely destroy them," Cruz added.
