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Spencer Ackerman
Wired
If you haven’t been following Washington’s agonizing debate over the defense budget, let us summarize it for you: Cutting the Pentagon’s allowance will kill your grandmother. Maybe the family dog, too. But definitely granny.
It’s one thing to brace for the pain of cuts that will probably slice $450 billion over 10 years from the defense budget. But it’s quite another to pretend, for the sake of leverage in Congress or to stroke a political or military constituency, that those cuts will open America’s ramparts to the barbarians. After all, even the hugest cuts imaginable will mean the U.S. spends $4 trillion on the military over 10 years instead of $5 trillion.
Yet day in and day out, new Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, members of Congress, think-tank wonks and journalists offer up steaming piles of hysteria over the defense budget. News flash: The Pentagon’s nightmare scenario of cuts north of $800 billion over a decade ain’t gonna happen. But since the hysteria is only going to increase over the next week, as a “Super-Committee” of legislators wheezes to meet its Nov. 23 deadline for cutting the federal budget, it’s time to compile a list of the most lunatic, paranoid, factually challenged, intelligence-insulting predictions on offer about the dire impact of defense cuts. Do it for grandma.
Goodbye, Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles
It’s not just some dirty hippie’s dream. It’s what Leon Panetta says will be a reality under “sequestration” — the budgetary term of art for the defense cuts that will be imposed if the Super-Committee fails. The cuts would “Eliminate [the] ICBM leg of Triad,” Panetta wrote to Sen. John McCain on Monday.
Translated from the wonk, that means no more intercontinental ballistic missiles. All 450 of them? Crated away.
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No. Just — no. Iran looks like it’s building a nuclear weapon. North Korea still has its own. And the Pentagon would allow the entire ICBM fleet to wither on the vine? Leaving the U.S. nuclear deterrent to be delivered only through relatively expensive bombers and submarines? Absolutely inconceivable. Demagogic. No.
The Mini-Me Military
Panetta’s letter to McCain didn’t just say that sequestration would be bad. He said it would be historically bad. As in the military would be reduced to a throwback force manned by practically no one. Or, as Panetta put it: “The smallest ground force since 1940. A fleet of fewer than 230 ships, the smallest level since 1915. The smallest tactical fighter force in the history of the Air Force.“
Before you go polishing off the Lee-Enfield rifles, Dreadnoughts and biplanes, consider this. In the estimation of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a hawkish D.C. think tank, sequestration would reduce the defense budget to a level not seen since … 2007.
“Under sequestration, the base [Defense Department] budget would fall to roughly $472 billion in FY [fiscal year] 2013,” writes budget analyst Todd Harrison. “This would bring the budget back to approximately the same level of funding as FY 2007, adjusting for inflation.”
The Army, Navy and Air Force of 2007 had their struggles. Freezing that force in amber would still leave a military capable of any competitor for at least the decade of budgets subject to sequestration. And with the Navy, Panetta’s using a debater’s trick: The current 283-ship Navy is already the smallest U.S. fleet since 1916, and it’s the finest Navy on Earth. Let’s not pretend it can barely deal with the Hun.
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