And some of the firing is indiscriminate, even "friendly fire." How did it happen, as the secretary himself said at Georgetown, that the Pentagon has been merrily spending on operations for the past four months "on the hope that the 2013 appropriations bill will be passed" at the higher level the administration had requested? On the hope? Didn't they notice that the defense budget has already gone down 10 percent in real dollars since fiscal year 2010? Defense just happens to have been a big item in the larger conflict over the federal budget for a couple of years. Has Panetta been living under a rock? "Silly us," the secretary said. Yes, indeed.
It has been blindingly clear for a year that sequester, if it happens -- it probably will and it will probably be fixed retroactively with deeper cuts to defense than the current budget projects -- will impact the operational accounts more than anything else. Not hardware contracts, not military personnel (whose pay and benefits are exempt). And it is clear that operations is where the "bloat" that Chuck Hagel has famously spoken about is located. It's time to manage that problem, sequester or not.
Remember, we spend more on defense than any other nation on Earth and more than most all other nations combined. Each service's budget is bigger than the entire military budgets of any other country. Even the smallish Marines and Special Operations Forces are bigger, each, than the militaries of most countries. We are overwhelmingly superior in every aspect of the military arts. And we overspend on defense because we do not control hardware costs, because we have the biggest (proportionally) "back office" of any major military, and because our military benefits continue to expand.
We have been fighting this Pentagon budget war, battle by repetitive battle, for more than two years now, with the same shots fired over and over. For more than a year, Secretary Panetta has been saying he had to cut $487 billion out of the defense budget, without ever noting that this was a reduction in the projected growth in the defense budget -- not a budget cut.
Every month, a Pentagon spokesperson says, "We get it wrong every time we do a defense drawdown and hollow out the force" when it is untrue. Only the drawdown of the 1970s caused severe readiness problems. The one Secretary Panetta (and I) participated in -- the 1990s drawdown -- left behind a dominant, global military force that performed just fine in 2003 in Iraq. And it cost half as much as the current force.
But repetition overwhelms the facts, and a barrage of data bewilders the adversary.
Now we are at sequester Gettysburg, and the Obama administration has rolled out the big guns. Only the Department of Overwhelming Force can run a domestic budget campaign. And it is aimed at the real enemy: the Republicans in the House and Senate. Most of Panetta's speech targeted Congress: Whose fault will it be if the United States suddenly has to withdraw its forces from the world because the GOP won't negotiate?
The endgame is to get the Republicans to the table -- a Republican Party that is divided on the defense issue and clearly motivated to get domestic spending down. The services are doing their best to terrify the Republicans into cutting a deal, and the administration is giving them free rein to make their case by any argument necessary, no matter how exaggerated. Like the bard said, "our revels now are over"; we have come to the crunch point. It is not about readiness abroad, it is about the readiness to deal at home.
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