Vice President Dick Cheney, who was on the road Monday speaking to marines at Camp Lejune, N.C., slammed US leaders over the past 22 years for weak responses to terrorist attacks across the globe. Listing several terror attacks from the 1983 marine barracks bombing in Beirut to the 1993 Task Force Ranger raid in Somalia to the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, Cheney said American response to the incidents emboldened our enemies. “Time and time again … the terrorists hit America and America did not hit back hard enough,” he said. “The terrorists came to believe they could strike America without paying any price.” Cheney told the marines that the terrorists would fail because men and women like them are “standing in their way and saying, ‘Not on our watch.’ ”
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall doesn’t see great value in trying to break the Sentinel ICBM program off as a separate budget item the way the Navy has with its ballistic-missile submarine program, saying such a move wouldn’t create any new money for the Air Force to spend on other…