The Pentagon never believed sequestration would actually happen, but now that it's here, things are unlikely to change, according to several defense experts who believe DoD's leadership is still in denial about the fact it's going to have to deal with significant reductions in its budget future/.../
Sequestration, which slices away evenly at almost all of DoD's programs and projects, was constructed by design to cut the budget in a non-sensible way so that Congress would force itself to find an alternative.
But Todd Harrison, the senior fellow for defense budget studies at Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, believes DoD and the White House made those nonsensical cuts even worse by staying in denial for the past year about the fact that they were a realistic possibility.
"None of us could have said a year ago that it was certain we'd be under sequestration, but it was perfectly foreseeable that that was a real possibility. There are things DoD could have been doing to prepare for that. Instead, they explicitly told everyone not to start preparing, not to start cutting back on spending, spend at the current rate as if sequestration is not going to happen," he said. "So what happened? Here we are, sequestration took effect five months into the fiscal year, and all these spent at a regular rate. So they have to take the cuts in the last seven months of the year. It makes the cut a lot steeper, and it gives you a lot less flexibility."