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Sequestration
Last month, Army Secretary John McHugh and Chief of Staff Raymond Odierno warned the armed services committees in the House and Senate that their service's readiness is rapidly approaching a crisis state. Budget cuts have resulted in cancellation of new depot maintenance work for the next two quarters
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Date:
5/13/2013
Word from Capitol Hill is that some members of the House Republican Conference have been unsettled by the strong public reaction to air-traffic delays brought on by sequestration. Until recently, sequestration was an abstraction, a philosophical debating point that had no real-world consequences,
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Date:
5/2/2013
The quick identification of likely perpetrators in the Boston Marathon bombing highlights how far federal, state and local authorities have come since 9-11 in preparing to cope with terrorist attacks. Less than a hundred hours after homemade bombs went off near the marathon's finish line, authorities
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Date:
4/19/2013
The new Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, gave his first formal press conference today. Sitting alongside Joint Chiefs Chairman, General Martin Dempsey, the Secretary covered a wide range of issues from the impacts of sequestration to growing threats from North Korea and the prospects for U.S
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Date:
3/28/2013
Whether by sequestration or some other mechanism, defense spending is headed down. If we make cuts wisely, we will still have the best trained and best equipped force in the world. If we don't, we will squander a decade of investment and become more vulnerable. Having cancelled and delayed weapons
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Date:
3/22/2013
It is generally agreed that the additional cuts to the defense budget required by sequestration will do more than just hurt the military; they will require significant force posture changes and, according to senior Department of Defense (DoD) officials, a new defense strategy. This should come as
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Date:
3/8/2013
The U.S. experience in Vietnam from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s was more than a tragedy; to many Americans it was a waste of lives and treasure. The failure to defeat North Vietnam and its principle backer, the Soviet Union, coupled to the defense draw down that began even before all U.S. forces
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Date:
3/7/2013
The Department of Defense is facing the budgetary equivalent of double jeopardy this year because in addition to suffering across-the-board cuts due to sequestration, it is also functioning under a Continuing Resolution (CR) that further constrains how money may be allocated. Like previous CRs,
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Date:
3/5/2013
What do the Battle of Savo Island, Kasserine Pass, Task Force Smith and Operation Eagle Claw have in common? They were all U.S. military disasters that were the result, broadly speaking, of inadequate readiness. In the first example, an allied naval force of some 22 surface warships was trounced
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Date:
3/4/2013
Sequestration kicks in later today, triggering automatic federal government spending cuts amounting to $85 billion over one fiscal year. It is quite the political and economic "crisis" that could only be invented in Washington.
Also invented in Washington is our central bank, the Federal
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Date:
3/1/2013
Sequestration is now in effect although for how long we do not know. If it lasts for the rest of Fiscal Year 2013 it will cut approximately $85 billion from federal spending. Over the next ten years the total reduction will be about $850 billion plus another $150 billion in savings on interest payments.
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Date:
3/1/2013
The nice thing about self-inflicted wounds is they can be ameliorated relatively easily. Just stop doing what is causing the injury. It is even easier if the action is preventative, meaning that it takes place before an injury is inflicted.
It is clear that sequestration will be a self-inflicted
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Date:
2/26/2013
Last week, former White House speechwriter Michael Gerson warned his fellow conservatives in the Washington Post that, "At the national level, Republicans have a winning message for a nation that no longer exists." He's right. Republicans are doing reasonably well at the state level, but
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Date:
2/26/2013
Republicans certainly have a point when they say it's hard to see how a two-percent sequestration of the federal budget will cause major damage. In the case of the military, though, the cuts really will be devastating. Half of the cuts will come from the fifth of the budget that is defense spending
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Date:
2/25/2013
There are good reasons to oppose the confirmation of Senator Chuck Hagel. His views on nuclear disarmament are out of the mainstream. His characterization of Jewish influence over Congress and the presence of a malevolent “Jewish lobby” in Washington are, at best, bizarre or, at worst, anti-Semitic.
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Date:
2/22/2013
For an institution that professes to be apolitical, the Pentagon has in recent weeks conducted a political campaign to protect its budget worthy of any special interest. In fact, in some ways it is worse. The way the Department of Defense (DoD) in general, but particularly the uniformed services
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Date:
2/21/2013
In a political system more polarized than at any time in recent memory, there is agreement across virtually the entire political spectrum on one thing: sequestration will do serious, possibly irreparable, damage to U.S. national security. This is a view shared by President Obama, House Speaker John
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Date:
2/20/2013
On March 1 the sixty-five year consensus in American politics on national security will be dead. On that day, sequestration goes into effect imposing what every senior military leader describes as catastrophic cuts on our military. While it is true that U.S. defense spending has gone through repetitive
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Date:
2/14/2013
Defense officials know that their acquisition system isn’t a free market but they often like to pretend otherwise. This has been the case most notably over the past four years. Confronted with declining defense budgets and rising costs for defense goods and services, Pentagon leaders have become
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Date:
2/11/2013
As the swinging axe of budget sequestration grows closer here in Washington, a lot of finger-pointing is being directed at the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. They do indeed have a lot of say in how this all unfolds, but it is worth remembering that there are two other power
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Date:
2/11/2013
With the sequestration doomsday clock clicking ever closer to midnight, the Pentagon has weighed in with its apocalyptic predictions. As described in text and multi-colored charts, the services will respond to sequestration by, in part, furloughing hundreds of thousands of civilian employees, eliminating
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Date:
2/8/2013
Most of the criticism of the lack of progress on undoing the blunt instrument that is sequestration has focused on the role of Congress and particularly the Republican-dominated House of Representatives. Left almost entirely out of this discussion is President Obama, the Commander in Chief. It was
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Date:
2/7/2013
U.S. Air Force leaders today released information indicating that America's global edge in air power will begin rapidly ebbing away in March if Congress fails to avert planned spending cuts. Documents prepared by the service predicted it will be "substantially less able to respond on short notice"
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Date:
2/7/2013
Joseph Stalin is alleged to have remarked with respect to military power that “quantity has a quality all its own.” At another time, the Soviet tyrant is recorded as having interrupted a speech by Winston Churchill on the need to treat Poland well because of the relationship between it and the Vatican
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Date:
2/6/2013
In the run-up to last November's elections, Republicans repeatedly warned that sequestration of defense funds would hurt America's military. But that was then. Here's where House Republicans are now, quoting Congressman John Fleming of Louisiana's Fourth District: "We would rather take some cuts
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Date:
2/4/2013
With a month to go it is looking increasingly likely that sequestration will happen. For the two or three of you who haven’t been paying attention, sequestration is the second part of the 2011 Budget Control Act passed by Congress and signed by President Obama. It requires cuts in discretionary
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Date:
1/31/2013
Pentagon leaders have been warning for years that formulaic cuts to the defense budget would damage America's military, and now it's about to happen. The first blow will come not from sequestration as everybody expected, but from a continuing resolution that limits fiscal 2013 spending to prior-year
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Date:
1/29/2013
How would you absorb a ten percent cut in your annual take home pay -- that is the money you have after paying withholding and taxes? There are two common ways of dealing with this situation. The first is to trim your expenses where you can, cutting back on eating out, going to movies, delaying
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Date:
1/25/2013
The Budget Control Act of 2011 requires cuts to the federal budget that cumulatively would save $2.1 trillion during the period 2012-2021. One facet of those cuts, commencing in the current fiscal year, would be across-the-board reductions known as sequestration. Under sequestration, all non-exempt
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Date:
1/16/2013
For most of the past year, the Department of Defense (DoD) refused to plan for the possibility of sequestration, the processes enshrined in the 2011 Budget Control Act (BCA) that mandated $500 billion in cuts to future defense budgets if a Congressional super commission was unable to find the equivalent
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Date:
1/14/2013
With overseas wars winding down and the government increasingly focused on deficit reduction, it is inevitable that many military sites in the U.S. will see their workforces shrink. That's especially true of the public-sector depots and shipyards that provide repair services for weapon systems,
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Date:
1/9/2013
Let me review the bidding. So far, the President got $600 billion in new taxes (plus the return to normal payroll tax levels and the new taxes to support ObamaCare). The Budget Control Act (BCA) already imposed $1 trillion in spending cuts. The next fight will be over more spending cuts in the context
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Date:
1/7/2013
The Budget Control Act of 2011 mandates $600 billion in spending cuts at the Pentagon over the next nine years, which minus an assumed 18% savings in interest payments from a smaller federal budget means an actual reduction of $492 billion -- $55 billion per year. That's on top of similarly-sized
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Date:
1/4/2013
Over the last two weeks, several reporters have asked me why I thought the defense industry's efforts to head off sequestration had not succeeded. In light of the last-minute decision to delay implementation by two months, it seems that the premise behind the queries may have been wrong. Congress
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Date:
1/3/2013
This week's fiscal compromise in Washington includes a two-month delay in implementing the sequestration provisions of the Budget Control Act. That's even better news for the defense sector than it sounds, because the outcome of negotiations this week strongly suggests that sequestration as currently
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Date:
1/2/2013
If the Department of Defense (DoD) were a country it would be the 18th or 19th largest economy in the world, ahead of developed economies such as Switzerland, Belgium and Sweden. Unfortunately, DoD has less in common with these countries and more with today’s “sick man” of Europe, Greece. Both the
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Date:
11/30/2012
Despite a continuous drumbeat of warnings about defense cuts, the outlook for the Pentagon's biggest weapon program is brightening perceptibly. Defense acquisition czar Frank Kendall told the Reuters news agency yesterday that the government and prime contractor Lockheed Martin are "getting close"
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Date:
11/29/2012
According to a recent report by OMB Watch, the White House has the ability to manage immediate effects of sequestration. By delaying the impact of sequestration, the White House will give the new Congress time to strike a deal with the administration regarding budget cuts.
To counteract the
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Date:
11/13/2012
With the election over and President Obama able to claim a mandate to continue the policies of the past four years, what are the chances of a deal being struck to avert the impending fiscal cliff? In his victory speech, the President said he would work with Republicans on a deal. House Speaker John
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Date:
11/8/2012
The late year hurricane that assaulted the East Coast provided a reason to consider one of the most important roles of the U.S. military: support to civil authorities. In the United States, the first line of defense against natural disasters is provided by “first responders,” local fire, police
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Date:
10/30/2012
Last week, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued memorandum M-12-19 regarding defense-contractor responsibilities under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. OMB has concluded WARN notices are unnecessary precautions against potential sequestration layoffs that
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Date:
10/9/2012
Discussions to date about sequestration have focused on major programs such as Medicare and defense spending or on large companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, SAIC and IBM. Lost in the noise is the potentially devastating impact on small and disadvantaged businesses. The irony is that both parties
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Date:
9/19/2012
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has issued a report on sequestration. According to the congressionally mandated report, sequestration is a terrible means for achieving deficit reduction that will result in significant economic damage.
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Date:
9/17/2012
The Middle East is ablaze again, literally, and Israel is sending strong signals that it intends to attack Iran's nuclear complex with or without U.S. assistance. It would be nice to stay out of this latest round of regional violence -- most Americans have had their fill of foreign entanglements
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Date:
9/14/2012
Even as the presidential election campaign heats up, foreign and defense policy are conspicuously absent from most of the discussions. In fact, the state of national security has been reduced to a “they said, they said” about who is responsible for creating the imminent fiscal cliff, in general,
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Date:
9/5/2012
Colorado certainly seems like Obama Country. One in four Coloradans say they aren't religious (much higher than the national average) and one in five are Latino. Colorado passed the nation's first liberalized abortion law and has a disproportionate number of young professional workers --
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Date:
8/2/2012
If you are a program manager in one of the military services, a budgeter in the Pentagon or a senior executive in the defense industry it must seem as if you are suffering death by a thousand cuts. First the Congress and the President agree to the Budget Control Act (BCA) which was advertised as
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Date:
8/1/2012
After Barack Obama carried New Mexico by a 15-point margin in the 2008 presidential race, some people forgot it was a swing state. But the reality is that Al Gore won the state by only 300 votes in 2000, and George Bush carried it by 6,000 in 2004, so there is no guarantee it will go for Obama
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Date:
7/26/2012
The Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) released a study on Tuesday estimating that if the sequestration provisions of the Budget Control Act are triggered on January 2 as currently legislated, the number of jobs lost would be about as great as the number created during the time President Obama
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Date:
7/18/2012
No one ever wants to cut the bone and muscle out of defense but everyone wants to cut the fat. Even the most ardent supporters of a strong defense and robust defense budgets will in the same breath speak of reducing waste. The trouble is that there is no agreement regarding what constitutes fat
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Date:
7/2/2012
A statistical analysis of how defense sequestration would impact employment in each of the 50 states finds that several "swing" states crucial to President Obama's reelection prospects would be hit especially hard. Specifically, four of the ten states losing the most defense jobs if sequestration
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Date:
6/26/2012
Senior executives of major defense companies rarely seek publicity. They also seldom openly criticize their customer, the Department of Defense, or the organization that provides that customer with funds, the U.S. Congress. So it is noteworthy when Robert Stevens, the outgoing CEO of Lockheed Martin
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Date:
6/20/2012
In the ten months since Congress passed the Budget Control Act last August, a stereotype has taken hold about the different ways in which Republicans and Democrats view the prospect of automatic cuts to the federal budget. Republicans, it is said, are mainly concerned about cuts in military spending
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Date:
6/14/2012
Senior executives at major defense companies are warning that the sequestration provisions contained in last year's Budget Control Act could produce chaos if they trigger as planned on January 2. The law requires that $60 billion be cut from defense accounts in fiscal 2013 as part of a ten-year
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Date:
6/8/2012
Over the last several months, discussion of budget sequestration in defense circles has taken on an increasingly grim tone. As the January 2 date when automatic cuts are scheduled to trigger draws closer with little sign of congressional movement to avert implementation, politicians, policymakers
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Date:
6/6/2012
Under the terms of the Budget Control Act passed into law last year, federal programs are due for automatic, across-the-board spending cuts beginning on January 2. The law calls for $1.2 trillion in new savings over the nine years between 2013 and 2021, with cuts split equally between defense and
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Date:
5/30/2012
As the clock ticks down to the January 2 deadline when automatic spending cuts are due to be triggered by last year's Budget Control Act, people in the defense sector are getting edgy. With little progress in Congress to avert sequestration likely before November elections, there will only be a
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Date:
5/22/2012
Although I have been in Washington for more than 35 years I cannot think of a law more stupid than the 2011 Budget Control Act (BCA). Not only did the Act first cut $489 billion from the defense budget over ten years but it mandated an additional $500 billion reduction starting in January 2013 if
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Date:
5/18/2012
Recently, the Lexington Institute published an analysis by a senior aerospace official of ways to reduce excess spending in defense.
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Date:
5/11/2012
Pressure on the defense industrial base is intensifying in the face of significant budget cuts and the looming threat of sequestration. Private sector companies are positioning themselves for a tighter market, increased competition and pressure on profits. In fact, the smartest companies began preparing
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Date:
3/19/2012
After being in denial for most of last year about the meaning of the Budget Control Act, Pentagon policymakers are beginning to realize that sequestration is probably going to happen. Under the law, that would result in the Pentagon's base budget being cut another $55 billion below the present
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Date:
3/16/2012
In 2011, Congress and the White House entered into a Faustian bargain in order to satisfy the competing demands for raising the debt ceiling and deficit reduction. The Budget Control Act (BCA) of 2011 mandated some $900 billion of cuts over 10 years in exchange for an initial debt limit increase
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Date:
2/21/2012
The Department of Defense is facing the prospect of massive spending cuts beginning next January as a result of the Budget Control Act. The law mandates automatic cuts to military spending beyond the $490 billion already planned because a special congressional committee failed to identify $1.2
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Date:
1/17/2012
Last week President Obama took the unusual step of going to the Pentagon to announce a new defense strategy. In doing so he did more than put his personal stamp on the new document. Obama also was drumming up support for the budget cuts ($480 billion over ten years) that had necessitated the reductions
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Date:
1/9/2012
InsideDefense.com blogger John Liang reports that Montana's two Democratic senators are up in arms over the prospect that intercontinental ballistic missiles based in their state might be retired. Liang revealed on December 9 that Max Baucus and Jon Tester had sent a letter to defense secretary
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Date:
12/13/2011
You don't need to look at big-ticket weapon systems like aircraft carriers and fighters to see what budget sequestration might mean for America's military capabilities. In fact, you don't need to look at Pentagon programs at all. Consider the Coast Guard, the modestly-funded maritime force located
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Date:
12/2/2011
The consensus around Washington is that the failure of the super committee to reach agreement on $1.2 billion in deficit reduction over ten years was a setback for just about everybody involved. Congress showed that it could not achieve a compromise. President Obama demonstrated he has no power
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Date:
11/30/2011
The defense department's logistics system and supply chain face unprecedented challenges. Most obvious is the continuing and growing pressure on defense budgets. Pentagon officials have begun to focus on reducing costs in the supply chain in their attempts to cope with budget woes. There is the
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Date:
11/30/2011
There is a mistaken notion floating around Washington that even if the super committee fails to arrive at a deficit reduction agreement this is no big deal because the reductions do not go into effect until January 2013. The theory goes that Congress will have plenty of time to undo the law or protect
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Date:
11/21/2011
Robert Ewers of Height Analytics put out a note on November 16 suggesting that full-scale sequestration of defense funds under the Budget Control Act is unlikely to occur given the devastating consequences. Among the consequences he cites are a ten-percent year-over-year decline in fiscal 2013
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Date:
11/17/2011
Back on August 18, I suggested that the Budget Control Act (BCA) contained two traps, one for the Obama Administration and the other for Republicans in Congress, particularly the new “Tea Party” faction. The traps are built into the automatic cuts that will be triggered by a failure of the so-called
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Date:
9/28/2011