It's hard to miss the irony: Leon Panetta, as President Clinton's budget guru, backed billions of dollars in Pentagon cuts. Now, as secretary of defense, he's warning that the U.S. could become a "paper tiger" if his department's budget is further reduced.On Monday, Panetta warned members of Congress that if the bipartisan budget supercommittee fails to agree on a plan, a set of automatic cuts would amount to "doomsday" for the military/…/
Todd Harrison, a fellow at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, thinks that if Panetta's dire warnings are meant by the White House to prod the supercommittee into a decision to forestall the cuts, it could backfire.
"The whole purpose of sequestration was to be a deterrent — it was to scare the supercommittee into agreement. The problem, though, is that if you ratchet up the rhetoric too high and you use too much hyperbole, that deterrent loses its credibility," Harrison said.
He said the military needs to look at reducing systems that played important roles in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but are no longer needed, such as the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle program and unmanned aerial vehicles that are only effective in environments where U.S. forces enjoy air superiority.