Sequestration, complete with furloughs for some civil servants, is on its way. And it is going to set defense planning on a different trajectory. Rather than being a "meat axe" or "Armageddon," sequestration may turn out to be just the kind of wake-up call the Pentagon needed.
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The appropriations bills likely to pass this week or next do not change that, though they will prevent a government shut-down. There was some discussion of providing special flexibility for the Defense Department in the appropriations bill so they could manage sequestration more easily. That's not going to happen unless the same flexibility is given to all agencies -- so there will be no relief at the Pentagon from the cuts.
For Congress, however, sequestration may turn out to be like the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process for the entire defense budget. As a series of unavoidable and somewhat arbitrary budget cuts which Congress cannot prevent, sequestration becomes the outside actor members can point to, saying, "It wasn't me; the sequester cut the budget." Just like they could point to a base closure proposal and say, "It wasn't me; the BRAC Commission set up the plan and I had to vote for the whole plan, up or down."
With the sequester, the defense drawdown is underway. And it is possible, just possible, that the new leadership at the Pentagon has begun to smell the coffee. On March 15, Secretary Hagel sent a memo to, well, basically everyone in the Pentagon, announcing that he had asked the deputy secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to carry out a "Strategic Choices and Management Review" by May 31 in light of "budgetary and strategic uncertainty."
This review is new, and it is going to come before the Pentagon machinery begins to grind away at its fifth Quadrennial Defense Review, the document that is supposed to guide long-term strategy, mission, and force planning. Hagel stepped in front of the QDR train and said, "Not so fast; we gotta take a look at where we are, to know where we can go." So, we get a review before the review.
This first look at the defense past and future could help him set out strategic choices and management challenges as a way to guide the QDR. But it has to be budget constrained, and two things are unclear: First, is the secretary going to put resource limits on an equal footing with strategic choices, as is necessary; second, is he going to make this review a real plan with real guidance for the QDR.
His spokesman, George Little, suggested that the answer to the first question is yes: "The review will define the major decisions that must be made in the decade ahead to preserve and adapt our defense strategy, our force, and our institutions under a range of future budgetary scenarios." A senior defense official may have undermined that intention, though, by fudging the second issue: "The department hopes never to have to work toward the contingencies this review might identify," the official said. If the budget cuts under sequestration are lifted, "those contingencies are likely to go away."
Deputy Secretary Ash Carter may have pulled the rug from under his own review in Indonesia on March 20, when he said "these arbitrary cuts are temporary, lasting through October of this year. The sequester mechanism is an artificial, self-inflicted, political problem, not a structure problem. The turmoil and gridlock will end, and the U.S. can get back to normal budgeting."
If Carter sticks to this view, the forthcoming Hagel review will be meaningless. While the across-the-board nature of sequestration goes away in October, the sharp reduction in the defense budget baseline for the next nine years is likely to remain. That is not "normal budgeting" by any stretch of imagination; it is a deeper downturn than the Pentagon now plans.
If the QDR is going to be realistic, as opposed to a wish list, the review had better not imagine normal business in the future, but instead be a serious, ground-breaking effort, and not a contingency plan. Sequester or not, the defense budget is declining, and probably at a rate that will strip $500 billion from the baseline then-Secretary Panetta projected last year. Hard choices and serious management will be needed, not hopes and wishes.
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