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For several months, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has been using extreme rhetoric to characterize cuts in the Pentagon budget beyond the $450 billion reduction over ten years he has already accepted.  With the failure of the so-called Super Committee in Congress to come up with a plan to address the federal deficit, Panetta has warned—over and over again—that an automatically triggered “Doomsday Mechanism” to impose another $450 billion in reductions over nine years would be a “catastrophe” that could be so crippling as to “hollow out the force,” and “enemies would be emboldened to attack the U.S.”

As a matter of Pentagon budget history, Panetta’s rhetoric and logic are—to put it politely—puzzling. Here’s...