Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal on Monday slammed President Obama for cutting defense spending and offered up his own plan to increase the Pentagon budget.
“Within the arena of national defense, the need now is for more funding, not less,” Mr. Jindal said in an advance copy of a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.
“That funding must be smarter — not motivated by domestic political priorities, but by what real threats America faces around the world,” he said. “The same problems which cause wasteful domestic spending behavior can also motivate wasteful defense spending — the worst kind of waste, as it leaves our forces unprepared and ill-equipped for the missions we give them.”
The speech will help burnish Mr. Jindal’s foreign policy credentials for a possible 2016 run for the Republican presidential nomination.
He also used the speech to take a swing at former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is considered the early favorite to for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016.
“Today, we are living with the consequences of the Obama-Clinton ideas when it comes to foreign, domestic and defense policy,” he said. “And those ideas have set America on a path that will create more chaos, more conflict and more wars.”
• S.A. Miller can be reached at smiller@washingtontimes.com.
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