What is Leon Panetta Thinking? Posted by Michael Cohen

So on Friday, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who is both a Democrat and a political hire of the President of the United States posted his thoughts on the Pentagon web site regarding the possibility of significant spending cuts for the Pentagon in the just signed debt limit deal:

I will do everything I can to ensure that further reductions in defense spending are not pursued in a hasty, ill-conceived way that would undermine the military’s ability to protect America and its vital interests around the globe. For example, the debt ceiling agreement contains a sequester mechanism that would take effect if Congress fails to enact further deficit reduction. If that happens, it could trigger a round of dangerous across-the-board defense cuts that would do real damage to our security, our troops and their families, and our ability to protect the nation.

This argument was followed up by Marc Thiessen and Max Boot whose default position is of course that the US can never ever reduce defense spending. But why is Panetta making a similar argument to these two and describing reductions in the DoD's bloated budget as some sort of existential threat to American power?

Now I understand that Panetta is new at the Pentagon and he wants to be seen as standing up for his agency. Fair enough, I get that. But this statement is, from both a political and policy perspective, decidedly unhelpful.

1) I completely agree with Panetta that across-the-board defense cuts - divorced from a larger national security strategy - are generally a bad idea. But the notion that it would do real damage to US security or hinder the military's ability to protect our nation is an argument based on fear rather than facts. (Did, for example, the far larger reductions that happened in the early 1990s put America at greater national security risk?)

The United States faces no existential threats to the continental United States - and no serious, near-term, great power rival. The threat of terrorism, which is a low-level challenge to the United States, could amply be defended against with a far smaller military than what we currently possess (it is Panetta himself who has said that al Qaeda is "within reach" of being defeated and is now down to a handful of core members). Indeed, after demands from the GOP, the across-the-board cuts that are part of the debt deal would include reductions to the Department of Homeland Security, which is actually the primary agency tasked with protecting against terrorist threats on US soil. This isn't to say that across the board cuts would cause some near-term dislocation, but the idea that it would do real damage to America's security or the ability of the military to protect the nation is fallacious.

2) Panetta seems to be arguing that cuts in defense spending would harm national security . . . without making any identification of what those would actually look like? 

Any observer of the Pentagon understands that DoD's budget is bloated - and indeed the money that we are talking about, over a ten-year time frame, is peanuts. According to Bill Hartung, the immediate cuts would reduce projected Pentagon spending by less than one percent. And here's a rather informative report that lays out $1 trillion in defense cuts over ten years that wouldn't harm US security and would represent real budget savings.

And as Gordon Adams points out, $900 billion in defense reductions (which would combine immediate cuts with the potential trigger) is "only 14% of the currently projected defense budgets over the decade, a more moderate build down than the one Secretary Panetta helped execute (though Secretary Cheney and Chairman Powell began it) in the 1990s."

Under Panetta's logic substantial reductions in the US defense budget would put the country at risk. It's one thing to argue this is bad policy (it is) it's quite another to use the politically convenient tool that such cuts will put Americans at risk. It's a risible argument.

3) Ignoring the substance of Panetta's comments, the political timing of them is terrible. The defense cuts in the debt limit deal was supposed to be a "win" for the left - an opportunity to ensure that the budget ax doesn't just fall on the poor and elderly, but affects the entire budgetary picture. 

But with Panetta arguing that they will weaken national security - and with the knowledge that Republicans on the so-called Super Committee will likely oppose any and all tax increases - guess where that ax will inevitably fall? To follow Panetta's argument to its logical end, Medicare and Medicaid recipients should bear the burden of deficit reduction.

And beyond that, Panetta's statement has fundamentally weakened the Democratic negotiating position in the Super-Committee. If the committee fails to reach an agreement and across-the-board defense cuts are immediately put into effect Republicans can use a Democratic Secretary of Defense's own words to argue that Congressional Democrats have weakened national security. Do you think this might put pressure on them to make concessions to entitlements in order to avoid those cuts? The pressure should be on Republicans if defense cuts are enacted, not Democrats. 

You know when Panetta bizarrely said a few weeks back that the US was in Iraq because of al Qaeda I was willing to cut him some slack, but this latest gaffe is far worse - it undercuts his own President and relies on discredited neo-con arguments to do so. I'm beginning to wonder if this post from a few months ago about the dangers of making Panetta Secretary of Defense were perhaps prescient. 

 

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The problem with Leon Panetta is that he is way too accomadating to the agencies that he is supposed to be in charge of such as the CIA and now the Defense Department. Rather than investigating what weapon programs need to be terminated or if the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are in America's best interests, Panetta just takes the advice of the generals and lets them dictate the future strategic direction of the United States. Sadly Panetta is typical of the Washingtion elites and their worship of the military. If Panetta were to resign tomorrow his successor would probably be not much better in curtailing the growth of military spending.

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