December 14, 2011

Is Panetta the Right Man for U.S. Defense Chief?

Winslow Wheeler, Time

AP Photo

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...

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TAGGED: Leon Panetta, Department of Defense, United States

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