Defense Secretary Leon Panetta worries that the 12-member deficit reduction committee won’t be able to write a formula to cut government spending that can pass Congress and win the president’s signature. If it does not, then across-the-board cuts will go into effect.
Sec. Panetta has pledged to cut $450 billion from the Pentagon over the next 10 years. If no deal is reached by Thanksgiving and all federal spending must be cut by a set percentage, he will be faced with an additional $500 billion reduction.
He argues that trimming the Pentagon back by $1 trillion — $10 billion a year — would gravely weaken U.S. military capacity, putting domestic security at risk along with the capacity to fight the wars against terrorism abroad that almost certainly will arise over the decade.
After 10 years of war in Afghanistan and eight in Iraq, the military needs rearming and retraining for the new types of warfare they have evolved. In addition, China’s growth as a military power has put pressure on the U.S. to beef up its Pacific forces at great expense.
Deep cuts in defense spending would also destroy jobs and corporate profits in almost every state in the union at a time when the biggest challenge facing this administration is putting people back to work and maintaining federal revenue.
If anyone does, Panetta has the skills it takes to prevent this budget disaster. His top-level federal service started under President Lyndon B. Johnson. He has been civil rights chief, congressman, budget director, White House chief of staff, and moved into his present job from heading the CIA. He was approved for this cabinet position by a 100-O vote in the Senate.
He will be able to make a powerful case to the deficit committee to come up with a combination of spending cuts and revenue increases that can pass Congress and win the president’s approval.
But if reason fails — as it has time after time in this divided government — and the committee defeats itself, Panetta and his allies will go to Congress and ask for a second opinion.
Panetta and friends will tell Congress how the cow ate the cabbage. The country, they will say, can’t afford to shoot itself in the foot with draconian defense cuts. It can’t afford to make itself a second-class military power; it can’t afford to weaken homeland security; it can’t afford to throw hundreds of thousands of Pentagon employees and defense industry employees out on the streets.
Besides, there is no more stupid way to cut federal spending than with an across-the-board meat ax that depends on the moronic assumption that all federal spending, from studying the sex life of miller moths to feeding the troops, is of equal importance to the nation.
Sec. Panetta is a man of colorful language. He will put the case in even plainer words.
In any case, he can be depended on to win the Pentagon budget battle this year or next. He will win because he will be right and his opponents will only be partisan.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
