Earlier this month, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced a plan to reorient defense spending away from lucrative boondoggles for contractors and toward systems that are proven to work and are needed in present-day military situations. Conservatives immediately cried foul; Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) went so far as to claim that the Obama administration “is willing to sacrifice the lives of American military men and women for the sake of domestic programs.”

Right-wing pundit Bill Kristol was among the conservatives fearmongering about the supposed “cuts.” Following North Korea’s test launch of a missile, Kristol declared that “it is scary to have a president” talk about cutting the defense budget. “It is a very dangerous moment,” he said. Today on Bill Bennett’s radio show, Kristol said he hoped that the pirate crisis would make President Obama think twice before following through on the proposed budget reforms:

KRISTOL: Unfortunately, given the world we live in, this [military funding] is not something we can skimp. And that’s another thing I hope the president realizes —

BENNETT: Budget cuts. The defense budget cuts, right?

KRISTOL: Well I hope he thinks about that. I mean, a lot of things that don’t look necessary — who needs the a big destroyer, the U.S.S. Bainbridge? Who needs Seals getting hours, weeks, months of training being snipers, isn’t that something that went out of fashion 70 years go? You can imagine people making these arguments. And it turns out, a lot of these things turn out to be important. … And I do hope it makes him sort of understand that there’s no substitute for having a strong and large military, honestly.

Listen here:

Kristol cites the pirate crisis — and the use of the U.S.S. Bainbridge — as some sort of proof that the plan to shift resources away from costly Naval destroyers is misguided. However, there was no need for a massive naval destroyer; in fact, it took “several hours” for the 8,000-ton ship to arrive at the scene. Indeed, as Matthew Yglesias noted, Gates himself mocked the idea that such ships could defend against pirates:

Gates is holding on to the Littoral Combat System project for the Navy even though the program has had a lot of cost overruns and so forth. Gates said that despite the problems, “I think it has a capability we just have to have.” Specifically, the promise of a ship that’s not only agile, but relative cheap on a per-ship basis is large. “You don’t need a $5 billion ship to go after pirates,” Gates said.

A greater number of less expensive ships would be arguably more effective than fewer, expensive naval destroyers like the Bainbridge and its even more expensive successors, the DDG-1000, which Gates is seeking to cut. Indeed, the defense budget reforms reflect the type of “reshaping,” Gates said, “that the combatant commanders are asking for.”

Kristol is not alone is seeking to use the pirate crisis to shill for increased defense spending. Last week, Fox military analyst Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney said on air that he would deploy the massively expensive and unproved F-22 to combat pirates. Conveniently, McInerney is a consultant for one of the F-22′s major contractors.

Commenting briefly on the resolution of Somali pirate-hostage episode over the weekend, President Obama expressed relief at the rescue of Captain Richard Philips by a Navy SEAL team, noting that “his safety has been our principal concern” throughout the crisis. Obama also stated that “we are resolved to halt the rise of piracy in that region.”

Conservatives had clearly been gearing up to exploit the situation as an argument about Obama’s “weakness” in the face of provocation. Upon the news of the hijacking last week, National Review’s Andy McCarthy tauntingly asked “what our new commander-in-chief proposes to do about it.”

Writing in the Weekly Standard, Seth Cropsey kept things nice and predictable by advocating “taking the fight to the pirates,” i.e. an overly militaristic response, and wondering whether the president had the guts to follow through.

Drawing a tenuous parallel between piracy and legal threats against Bush administration officials for war crimes, the Wall Street Journal fret-itorialized “if the U.S. government won’t protect American citizens from the legal anarchy of postmodern Europe, how can we expect it to protect American sailors from the premodern anarchy of Somalia”?

As it was, President Obama — while clearly mindful of the larger implications of piracy for U.S. interests — made the life of the American hostage, and not the maintenance of perceptions of American strength, the immediate objective of the operation. With the captain’s life in apparent jeopardy, deadly force was authorized and used effectively, and the situation was brought to a satisfactory conclusion with a welcome lack of bluster that would have been unimaginable under the previous administration. After having cued up their outrage for Obama’s expected failure, conservatives are now strangely silent in the face of his actual success.

It’s worth pointing out, however, that even the smartest, most effective response can have troubling unintended outcomes. Earlier today, Somali insurgents fired mortars toward New Jersey Congressman Donald Payne’s plane as it took off from the Somali capital Mogadishu. Payne, who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa, had met with the Somali president and prime minister to discuss “piracy, security and cooperation between Somalia and the United States.” It’s unclear whether the mortar attack was intended specifically as a response to the shooting of the pirates, but it does bring home the fact that in Somalia, as in Afghanistan, security threats are generated by a lack of governance, a larger and more complex problem that cannot simply be solved by resolute shows of force, regardless of how such shows get conservative tails wagging. As Somali government spokesman Abdi Haji Gobdoon told the Christian Science Monitor, concerned nations “send ships but we need stability on land.”

Yesterday, the Navy Seals launched a daring and successful effort to free the American cargo ship captain who had been held hostage by Somali pirates for five days, killing three pirates. Throughout last week, some conservatives used the hostage situation to lobby for military action and massive defense spending on irrelevant weapons.

At the forefront of the calls for war was, unsurprisingly, former U.N. Ambassador and perpetual war-monger John Bolton. Even after the successful rescue of the American hostage, Bolton endorsed a ground invasion of Somalia this morning on Fox News:

FOX HOST: Ambassador, if you were serving in this administration, would it be your recommendation that they go in to, militarily with air strikes and/or boots on the ground, into these so-called feral cities, where these pirates are taking hold? Should we go in and take those people out, and take their installations out, now, militarily? Is that what you’re suggesting?

BOLTON: Yes. … Unless we go in and really end this problem once and for all, we will simply see it grow over time.

On Friday, Bolton called for a “coalition of the willing” to attack Somalia, saying the use of force was “the prudential response” to piracy problems. He kept up his calls for war over the weekend. Watch it:

For Bolton, war is always the best option. Last year, he said that attacking Iran “is really the most prudent thing to do.” In 2002, he declared Saddam Hussein to be “a real threat,” making it “a very prudent and logical conclusion that he needs to be replaced.” And less than two weeks before Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, Bolton praised “the prudent course we are on with Iraq.”

Bolton’s insistence that we will see the piracy off the coast of Somalia “grow over time” without U.S. military intervention to “end this problem once and for all” is striking. Back in 1994, Bolton lambasted the Clinton administration for expanding the U.S. mission in Somalia to prevent it from becoming a failed state. Clinton’s efforts “led to the violence and embarrassment that ultimately ensued,” Bolton wrote.

In 2005, Bolton stood by his critique, saying, “I would not have intervened in Somalia.” Today, however, Bolton views such intervention — including the possibility of “boots on the ground” — as “the prudential response.”