CSBA in the News

A consensus is emerging in Washington that even if Congress finds a way to cancel the automatic budget cuts of sequestration, the Defense Department is in for more spending reductions over the next decade. A new exercise by one think tank shows the department has a lot of different ways to handle those cuts — some more thoughtful than others.

As the U.S. military grappled with budget cuts over the past year, one thing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta made clear was the Pentagon must avoid reductions in training and maintenance that would lower the force’s readiness to fight.

The Pentagon should continue to invest in special operations forces, offensive and defensive cyber capabilities, new manned and unmanned long-range strike aircraft and undersea vessels even as defense spending declines in the coming decade, according to a new think tank report.

The Pentagon has spent much of the past decade figuring out how to spend more each year, rather than less. Military and civilian leaders, as former Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen once said, have “lost their ability to prioritize.”

The defense industry has $500 billion in pending Pentagon cuts at stake in the “fiscal cliff” talks, yet it finds itself largely sidelined in the heated debate.

Discussion of the “fiscal cliff” since the presidential election has focused so far on the type and amount of tax increases that congressional Republicans might accept and the changes in entitlement programs that President Obama and Democrats could agree to in exchange. Sooner or later, however, the negotiations must turn to the crucial subject of defense spending. The automatic spending cuts due to kick in at the beginning of next year include $56.5 billion from the Pentagon, more than 10 percent of its base budget. If left unchanged, the sequester would cut defense by $454 billion over a decade.