In an attempt to illustrate their toughness to be the next commander in chief, the Republican presidential candidates spent their fifth national debate Tuesday night viciously attacking President Barack Obama, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, and each other.
The Las Vegas event was the first since the terrorist attacks in Paris and California linked to Islamic State group ISIS sympathizers, and questions focused on how to keep the country safe and defeat the Middle East extremist state.
Just a day earlier, Obama visited the Pentagon to reassure the public that his limited military intervention in the region will lead to the demise of the group, but the GOP hopefuls universally called that approach naive and ineffective.
"We need a president who understands [that] the first obligation of the commander-in-chief is to keep America safe," said Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who has risen near the top of the the polls in recent weeks. "If I am elected president, we will hunt down and kill the terrorists. We will utterly destroy ISIS."
Cruz called for "overwhelming air power to utterly and completely destroy ISIS" and arming more friendly fighters in the region, calling Obama's current strategy "photo-op foreign policy."
That drew criticism from Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who blasted Cruz for selected votes against growing the defense budget.
"You can't carpet bomb ISIS if you don't have planes and bombs to attack them with," he said. "And if we continue those cuts that we're doing now, not to mention additional cuts, we are going to be left with the oldest and the smallest Air Force this country has ever had, and that leaves us less safe."
It was far from the only sparring of the night.
Business mogul Donald Trump, already under criticism for comments suggesting banning all Muslim visitors from entering the United States, didn't back away from that stance or one threatening the families of terrorists.,saying
""We have to be much tougher, we have to be much stronger than we've been,." Trump said.
He drew repeated attacks from former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who said his presidency would be marked by drawing the best advice from military commanders and foreign-policy thought leaders.
"Two months ago, Donald Trump said that ISIS was not our fight," he said. "And he gets his foreign policy experience from the shows. That is not a serious kind of candidate. We need someone that thinks this through, that can lead our country to safety and security."
When New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie promised to set up a no-fly zone in Syria and "shoot down the planes of Russian pilots if, in fact, they were stupid enough to think that this president was the same feckless weakling that the president we have in the Oval Office is right now," Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul quipped " if you're in favor of World War III, you have your candidate."
Paul, who has been labeled an isolationist by critics, urged caution in entering a new, ever-deepening war in the Middle East.
But Ohio Gov. John Kasich called that approach too fearful to be effective.
"We have to go massively, like we did in the first Gulf War where we destroyed Saddam's ability to take Kuwait," Kasich he said. "We need to have a coalition that will stand for nothing less than the total destruction of ISIS and we have to be the leader. We can't wait for anybody else."
Business leader Carly Fiornia seemed to insult several rivals simultaneously when she noted that "talking tough is not the same as being strong." She promised to "bring back the warrior class," naming former Gens. David Petraeus, Stanley McChrystal, and James Mattis as military experts forced out because they disagreed with Obama.
"To wage war, we need a commander in chief who has made tough calls in tough times and stood up to be held accountable over and over, — not first-term senators who've never made an executive decision in their life," she said.
Neurosurgeon Ben Carson reprimanded the public's "phobia about boots on the ground," and said that increased military intervention may be needed to win the fight.
"If our military experts say, we need boots on the ground, we should put boots on the ground," he said.
"We need to start thinking about the needs of the American people before we go and solve everybody else's problems … For us to think that we're going to in there and fix that with a couple of little bombs and a few little decorations is relatively foolish,." he said.
Clinton got more than two dozen mentions from the nine GOP frontrunners, including blame for the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, the rise of the Islamic State group ISIS and policies that have made the country unsafe.
She'll have her chance to respond on Saturday, when the Democrats hold their third national debate in New Hampshire.
Leo covers Congress, Veterans Affairs and the White House for Military Times. He has covered Washington, D.C. since 2004, focusing on military personnel and veterans policies. His work has earned numerous honors, including a 2009 Polk award, a 2010 National Headliner Award, the IAVA Leadership in Journalism award and the VFW News Media award.
