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 why…
Figure 1 below shows DOD spending since World War II and projects it out to 2021. It uses the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) estimates for the size of the Pentagon budget for the years 2013 to 2021 under the “Doomsday Mechanism” (also known as sequestration) triggered by the Budget Control Act negotiated between President Obama and Congress last summer. (CBO’s numbers pertain to the larger “National Defense” budget function; they are adjusted here to pertain only to the Pentagon.)
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