That is how Pentagon officials, lawmakers and industry executives have described $500 billion in automatic military budget cuts set to kick in Jan. 2 unless Congress comes up with a solution.
Yet amid all the dramatic rhetoric about those cuts, several nonpartisan Washington think tanks have produced analyses that suggest the process known as sequestration might be manageable/.../
The CSBA study, conducted by Todd Harrison, acknowledges that a sequester “would slow down nearly everything DoD does,” and predicts fewer new contract awards and extensions.
As McCain noted last week, the CSBA study says the DoD would be forced to buy things “in smaller quantities.” McCain said that means the department would be able to afford “a lot less.”
But Harrison’s findings suggest the cuts would not trigger “immediate program terminations” because “funding already obligated on contracts would not be affected.”