The Pentagon's No. 2 civilian directed military departments and acquisition personnel to proceed with normal operations, including training and contracting, even though action hasn't been taken to avert looming spending cuts.
The Pentagon “needs to continue normal spending and operations,” Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter told Defense Department and military service heads in a memo obtained yesterday by Bloomberg News/.../
Carter’s guidance “is fully consistent with the Pentagon’s sequestration strategy to date, which has been to just ignore it and assume it will go away,” Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst for the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, said in an e-mail/.../
Harrison said the trouble with that approach is that “if sequestration does occur, you will have to implement a year’s worth of cuts in the nine remaining months of the fiscal year” that began Oct. 1, he said.
“The cuts will have to be deeper,” he said, “and some cuts require more time to implement, such as giving furlough notices to civilian employees, so you may end up with only seven or eight months to implement the cuts.”