In a debate exchange Monday night that set Twitter on fire, President
Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney crossed swords over
the kinds of equipment and materials the U.S. military uses for modern
warfare.
In a response to Romney’s barb that Obama has allowed the U.S. Navy’s
inventory of battleships to approach a historic low mark, Obama snarked
that “we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our
military’s changed.”
But horses and bayonets both remain vital parts of the U.S. arsenal.
The Daily Caller won a prestigious Edward R. Murrow award this year for a
war report about the American soldiers who — riding on horseback — were
the first U.S. forces to fight in Afghanistan after the 9/11 terror
attacks.
And bayonets
remain a fixture in Army infantry training and deployment. On August 6 a
blogger at the Gizmodo technology website reported that the military
was trading in bayonets for a “tomahawk”-like hand-to-hand combat
weapon, but it later emerged that the source of that erroneous report was Duffelblog — a military spoof website modeled on The Onion.
“I think Gov. Romney maybe hasn’t spent enough time looking at how our military works,” Obama claimed Monday night.
“You — you mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer
ships than we did in 1916. Well, governor, we also have fewer horses and
bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these
things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these
ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.”