Romney looks to the future. Obama... just looks.

The state of the world and America's place explained.

The third presidential debate ended with Romney looking presidential.  Romney was consistently painting a large view of what we as a nation should do.  President Obama, meanwhile, nitpicked, contradicted and looked angry. For all that, Romney did not seem in the least bit put off his game.

In the face of Obama's planned military cutbacks, planned at a trillion dollars, Romney raised the concern that we will not be able to maintain our military capabilities. To that the president stated outright the sequster will not happen. Mr. Romney was concerned, and laid out his case:

"Our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917. The Navy said they needed 313 ships to carry out their mission. We’re now at 285. We're headed down to the low 200s if we go through a sequestration. That's unacceptable to me.”

“I will not cut our military budget by a trillion dollars, which is a combination of the budget cuts the president has, as well as the sequestration cuts. That, in my view, is making our future less certain and less secure.”

Staring... staring... and more staring. 

Yes, indeed. Excellent, practical point... to which we get some silly Obama repartee for an answer:

“I think Gov. Romney maybe has not spent enough time looking at how our military works. We also have fewer horses and bayonets because nature of our military has changed. “There are these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines."

“The question is not a game of Battleship, where we’re counting ships, it’s what are our capabilities,”

Battleship?!  What is he talking about?  And yet the Obamiacs thought that was a great moment for the great one. But lets look at it, perhaps more critically than the typical Obamiac would.

Sequestering is the term for mandatory budget reductions, which comes out in cuts:

The Defense Department makes up a disproportionate share of the cuts – $500 billion, at least $55 billion of which would go into effect immediately. It’s not clear yet how the Pentagon would put them in place

Obama claimed a sequster will not happen, but his White House was on the phone immediately afterwards walking the statements back:

White House senior adviser and 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe softened the Obama administration's language on the sequester after President Obama insisted that it would not happen.

"No one wants it to happen," Plouffe told reporters

Yes, well, that is not the same as saying it will not happen, and certainly the difference is very real to the people in the military whose equipment, supply and personnel end up on the wrong side of the contraction.

If the Navy says it needs 313 ships to complete its mission, it doesn't matter that Obama is aware we have things called nuclear submarines. The world is a scary place, with a lot of bad people out there. We face problems in the Far East. We face problems in the Middle East. We cannot project power in these areas with drone strikes, for cripe's sakes.

If the Navy says it needs 300 ships, the president cannot idly sit by while it is reduced to 200 ships - not and expect us to maintain our ability to protect ourselves and influence the world in which we live. The reality is the military will be required to reduce its size and capabilities if we do not fund it. There is no way around that. Mr. Obama had no answer except to suggest we don't need ships and planes and the like.

Weakness invites aggression Mr. President. After all your carrying on about what you've learned on the job, if there was one thing you should have learned while acting commander in chief, it was that.