Best Case For Sequester Is Still Disaster, Top Experts Say

http://breakingdefense.com/2013/05/29/best-case-for-sequester-is-still-disaster-top-experts-say/



Best Case For Sequester Is Still Disaster, Top Experts Say
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on May 29, 2013 at 9:56 PM

CAPITOL HILL: The best case for sequester is still a disaster – but we’re not going to get the best case. That’s the common denominator from a range of budget options rolled out today by an extraordinary alliance of four thinktanks.

Their consensus recommendations to cut military readiness, Army brigades, Navy carriers, Air Force ICBMs, and an array of aircraft – including, in three of the four groups’ proposals, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter – came from a kind of fiscal wargame. The simulation was developed by the influential Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments to explore alternative ways to implement approximately $500 billion in cuts to defense spending over the next 10 years. [Click here for detailed slides]. The subtle sting: They arrived at their dire conclusions based on what CSBA budget expert Todd Harrison admitted were “some very generous assumptions.”

Finding over $500 billion in cuts was a manageable misery under CSBA’s rules for the budget wargame, said Robert Work, the former undersecretary of the Navy, who now heads the Center for a New American Security. But that doesn’t reflect the rigid restrictions of the current sequestration law, which, among other things, requires cutting the exact same amount, about $52 billion, every year for the next 10 years.

That’s “craziness,” said the always-blunt Work, a retired Marine Corps artilleryman. “If we have to hit the targets year by year, the wheels will come off, and I speak from personal experience….We will go back to the 1975 era when I had to buy toilet paper for my Marines.”



unhappycamper comment: All this anguish is about a lousy five percent budget cut.