Newt!, by Dick Williams: on Homeland Security

Newt Gingrich: Wishes he volunteered for Vietnam; exempt due to young kids

Over the years, I've heard Newt Gingrich say many times that he wishes he had volunteered. Whatever his feelings were in the middle of the 1960s--and if he was like most young men in his age group they changed more than once--Gingrich never was at risk of being inducted. The accusations of draft-dodging by his political foes ring hollow. And comparisons with Bill Clinton, who was consumed by finding the least politically damaging way to avoid service, are an exercise in apples and oranges.

Newt Gingrich: Co-founded Military Reform Caucus as "cheap hawk solution"

Gingrich developed the "cheap hawk solution": the nuclear age required a quick-response, mobile military; and such a force could be as effective as the Navy, with its expensive aircraft carriers, and the Army, with its huge, heavily armed divisions.

Gingrich allied himself with the analysts who were developing the fast-attack tenets of maneuver warfare called the AirLand Battle Doctrine. The "cheap hawk solution" became an arrow in the Republican quiver, as it staved off Democratic attempts to cut the Pentagon budget. "Don't try to reform the current system," he said of Pentagon procurement in early 1995. "It is hopeless. It is impossible." The Speaker views many current Pentagon policies as part of the antiquated industrial age.

Newt Gingrich: Women not suitable for combat due to infections

Amid the coverage of the comments, it was next to impossible to find a news story on the effects of extended field duty on female combatants. And it was impossible not to hear Rep. Pat Schroeder lampooning him by suggesting that no men she knew had a desire to hunt giraffes.

"Occasionally you get taken grotesquely out of context, but that's fine," Gingrich said. "It is part of the process of getting the message out."