FPI Analysis on Defense Spending and the Super Committee

The Foreign Policy Initiative, where I work, released last week an study, FPI Analysis: Defense Spending and the Super Committee. It begins:

President Obama and Congress arrived at a grand bargain to raise the debt limit on August 3, 2011. But due to the debt-limit deal's far-reaching and controversial terms, great uncertainty looms over the future of Department of Defense (DoD) spending.

Known as the Budget Control Act of 2011 (Public Law 112-25), the debt-limit deal created a "Super Committee" of twelve lawmakers to hammer out a bill that reduces the federal deficit over ten-years by more than $1.2 trillion. However, if this bill doesn't become law by mid-January 2012, then the debt-limit deal's so-called "trigger" provision will automatically reduce defense spending in not just one, but two ways. First, it will establish new long-term caps to limit discretionary spending that will cut over $550 billion from what the Pentagon (based on Obama's fiscal year 2012 budget proposal) was projected to spend in the next ten years. Second, the trigger provision's multi-year "sequestration" cuts will further slash roughly $600 billion more in the worst-case scenario. In all, the trigger provision could effectively cut anywhere from $575 billion to over $1 trillion from projected defense spending over the next decade.

As this analysis details further below, the Defense Department's civilian and military leaders--including Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and General Martin Dempsey--have described further deep cuts to the Pentagon's budget as "devastating" and "extraordinarily difficult and very high risk."

Read the whole thing.

Posted by Robert at September 21, 2011 11:30 AM