In an interview in the New York Times on Oct. 23, 2011, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned against cutting defense spending too severely as the U.S. winds down its involvement in Iraq and reconsiders how to proceed in Afghanistan.
"After every major conflict - World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the fall of the Soviet Union - what happened was that we ultimately hollowed out the force, largely by doing deep, across-the-board cuts that impacted on equipment, impacted on training, impacted on capability," Panetta told the newspaper. "Whatever we do in confronting the challenges we face now on the fiscal side, we must not make that mistake."
"'Hollowing out' is a rather imprecise term that is floating around the Pentagon a lot these days," said Todd Harrison, senior fellow for defense budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent think tank on defense and related spending. "It can mean not providing troops with adequate pay and benefits so that the best ones leave. It can mean not providing troops with adequate training, leaving them unprepared for combat. Or it can mean providing troops with substandard equipment, poorly maintained equipment or an insufficient quantity of equipment. When Panetta and others in the Pentagon say this, I'm not sure if they mean all of these things happened in the past or just some of them."