In some ways, a second Obama term is likely to mean some degree of continuity in the Defense Department. But the shape and size of the government's largest and most complex department over the next few years will depend to a large degree on what happens over the next few weeks/.../
Those question marks make it hard to foresee what the impact of a second Obama term on DoD will truly be, said Todd Harrison, the senior fellow for Defense budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
"Sequestration is really the big unknown right now. This huge fog bank really just prevents us from seeing much beyond Jan. 2," he said.
Nonetheless, Harrison said while the sequestration debate that will happen in the lame-duck session of Congress has little to do with Defense and more to do with disagreements over tax policy and entitlement spending, it's unlikely that DoD will escape the debate without further cuts beyond the $487 billion agreed to last year.
"If anything, it's just because of history. The Defense budget has gone through three cycles of spending since World War II, and it looks like we're coming off of one of the peaks in those cycles," he said. "If historical trends hold true at all, we could be looking at a 20 or 30 percent gradual reduction in spending over the next decade. Given the fact that we have a near-record federal deficit right now, it seems reasonable to assume that Defense is going to be part of that deficit reduction effort."
That gradual spending cut would be preferable, from DoD's perspective, to the indiscriminate 10-percent, across-the-board decreases that would happen immediately next year under sequestration. Pentagon officials have consistently maintained that the problem with sequestration isn't just the amount of the cuts, it's the fact that the process robs leaders of any discretion to prioritize.
Harrison thinks with the cuts on a gradual slope, the Obama administration's defense policy in a second term will still hew closely to the strategy it rolled out in January.
"We're going to see a lot of continuity, as one would expect when the administration has not changed. We will have to see some tweaks to that strategy though if the budget is reduced either from sequestration or some other deficit reduction deal," he said. "DoD has made it pretty clear that the strategic guidance they put forth last year was tied to the budget, and they wouldn't be able to execute it without that budget. And I think that's true."