As the Pentagon prepares to unveil its fiscal year 2013 budget request next week, the sequestration beast is back in the news again.
Pentagon officials would be wise to make fallback plans that would prepare for hundreds of billions in additional funding cuts in the next decade should Congress fail to enact legislation in the next 11 months to nullify the massive cuts, dubbed “sequestration,” that are set to go into effect in January 2013, a pair of prominent analysts warned Wednesday.
“The failure to plan for the possibility of further reductions [in defense spending], I think, really is a major shortfall in the new defense strategy that they laid out,” said Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis (CSBA) discussing the Pentagon’s soon to be released 2013 budget request this morning in Washington. “Because if you look at history, you don’t see plateaus in defense spending, it doesn’t just decline a little bit and then flatten out for the rest of the decade …if this decline is anything like what we’ve seen in the past three defense cycles [post Korean, Vietnam and Cold Wars], there are further cuts to come and the current strategy needs to be flexible and adaptable enough to adjust to that. The Pentagon can and they should begin preparing for the possibility of more reductions, especially sequestration, and I think if they fail to do that they run the risk of being unprepared for what is a perfectly foreseeable contingency.”
Harrison was referring to the fact that the Pentagon’s new 21st Century Defense Strategy does not seem to plan for any further funding cuts beyond the $487 billion in savings it is supposed to achieve in the next decade.
He added that the best chance to avoid sequestration died when the 12 lawmakers of the so called, deficit reduction supercommittee, failed to come up with a specific plan to reduce government spending. Now, all of Congress will have less than a year to hammer out a plan to reduce government spending in order to offset sequestration.