By Bob Beauprez
Saturday, January 12, 2013
The Defense Department "Sequester" – a budget
gimmick originally described as "ridiculous" by Harry Reid and the
President's Chief of Staff – has become a Gordian Knot that the White House and
Congress have so far failed to unravel.
Originally scheduled to be force implemented on January 1, 2013, it
escaped solution during the New Year's Eve fiscal cliff fiasco. Instead, the problem was just kicked down the
road a few more weeks with a new drop-dead date of March 1.
Rather than providing relief, the legislative inaction
accentuates uncertainty and compresses even further the time frame in which the
Pentagon would be forced to implement $45 billion of immediate cuts and $500
billion over the longer term.
It's no way to run an Army…or Navy, Air Force, Marines,
and Coast Guard for that matter.
Last May, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warned that
the $500 billion of DoD cuts would be "disastrous" to national
security, hoping to get the attention of Congress and the White House for a
timely solution. Eight months later, the
Pentagon is still waiting.
On Thursday, Panetta and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff General Martin Dempsey provided an ominous assessment of the
consequences of inaction. Below are some
key excerpts from the briefing and a link to an expanded Politico.com
report.
No one seems to like or be willing to take responsibility
for the sequester. But neither has
anyone figured out how to avoid it.
During the third Presidential debate on October 22, 2012
Barack Obama lied when he said, “The sequester is not something that I've
proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed.” But, as Bob Woodward documented in "The
Price of Politics" the idea came right out of the White House.
Further, Jack Lew, President Obama's Chief-of-Staff who
yesterday was nominated to be the next Treasury Secretary, is
"credited" with selling the sequester idea to Harry Reid on behalf of
the White House. Reid originally called
the idea "ridiculous" when Lew and White House Legislative Affairs
Director Rob Nabors first introduced it to him.
"That's the beauty of a sequester, they (Lew and Nabors) said, it's
so ridiculous that no one ever wants it to happen," according to the
account of events in Woodward's book.
Reid then said, "I get it."
Now the ridiculous is threatening military preparedness
and national security to the point that Obama's own Sec-Def says "we have
no idea what in the hell is going to happen."
Apparently, when you're responsible for selling a really
bad idea to Congress on behalf of the Obama Administration you get promoted
instead of fired.
Following are key excerpts from Politico.com. Full report available here.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Thursday he has
ordered the Pentagon to begin planning now for the triple crisis facing the
government this March, telling reporters it was a “perfect storm” that could
leave the military with a worst-case outcome: a “hollow force.”
Panetta and the nation’s top uniformed officer, Joint
Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, said in a briefing that March’s potential
across-the-board budget cuts, the expiration of the continuing spending
resolution that now pays for the government and the potential that the U.S.
could default on its debt all were too serious not to begin immediate
preparations.
“The fact is, looking at all three of those, we have no
idea what the hell’s going to happen,” Panetta told reporters at the Pentagon.
“All told this uncertainty, if left unresolved by the Congress, will seriously
harm our military readiness.”….
“I’d like to believe that ultimately, Congress will do
the right thing,” Panetta said. Now, however, “my fear in talking to members of
Congress is that this issue may now be in a very difficult place in terms of
their willingness to confront what needs to be done to de-trigger sequester. So
all those reasons, plus the uncertainty about what happen on the CR, the debt
ceiling, put all that together, and we simply cannot sit back now and not be
prepared for the worst.”….
(Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said,) “If
we’re required to do these cuts, suddenly we’ve got to achieve these levels of
savings, how do you protect the war-fighters, those involved in Afghanistan,
those areas that are critical to our national defense? So where do you go? You
go to readiness, you go to maintenance, training, this is where the cuts are
ultimately made, and when that happens, it make us less ready.”
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