The newspapers are full of articles about negotiations over tax hikes and spending cuts as Congress and the White House face the impending “fiscal cliff.” There is much less said about another consequence of our mindless budgeting: the very real possibility that our armed forces will face devastating cuts on January 2. That is less than a month away but, given how little attention sequestration is receiving, it feels as if we’re sleepwalking toward disaster.
This, in spite of the fact that there is bipartisan agreement that sequestration will have dreadful consequences for our military readiness, requiring an across-the-board cut of roughly 10 percent in all spending, no matter how important. That will amount to $500 billion over the next decade–on top of the nearly $500 billion already enacted in 2011. Even those such as retired Admiral Mike Mullen and retired Senator John Warner, who think that it’s OK to cut the military budget judiciously, oppose the sequestration approach. As Warner said at an event in Washington: “You cannot take a sledgehammer [to the Pentagon budget]… We can and should reduce it. But it has to be done carefully. … You cannot break defense and hope to glue it back together the next day.”
Yet the sledgehammer is about to swing–unless Congress acts to stop it in the next weeks. Time is running out and the signs do not look good. If sequestration does go through and is not immediately reversed, it would do more damage to our military readiness than any foe that our troops have fought in decades.
That's because Obama and the rest of the government aren't on the same page. This was always intended to be a strategic threat – never acted upon. Obama though wants it to happen. He wants a radically shrunk military in the style of Europe where the Armed Forces are unionized and little more than another avenue for the government to be an employer of last recourse while removing most of the American footprint from the world's stage. With all the money he saves he can hire millions more Federal employees domestically. That's been the plan.