Squeezing The Pentagon: The Wrong Way To Cut America’s Military Budget -- The Economist
SOME attacks come out of nowhere. Others arrive with plenty of warning. The 2011 Budget Control Act (BCA), also known as the sequester, was one of the latter. But for a long time the Pentagon ignored it, assuming that the cuts to defence spending it contained would never happen.
Those cuts—$500 billion over the next nine years, on top of $487 billion already under way—were designed to be so painful that they would force Republicans to do a budget deal with Barack Obama to avoid them. But it turns out that Republicans hate taxes even more than they love the armed forces. No deal was reached. On March 1st the sequester began.
Struggling to find savings of $37 billion in the rest of this fiscal year, the Pentagon is at last making serious plans. This month it is expected to produce a report outlining the impact of the $52 billion-worth of cuts that are heading its way for the next fiscal year, which begins in October.
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My Comment: To say that "tough times" are ahead for the Pentagon is an understatement .... and what is unbelievable is that everyone is unprepared for it.
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