WASHINGTON - While Iran, Russia, and China
are all pretty scary, the ominous word
"sequestration" is what is keeping right-wing
hawks and their friends in the defense industry up
at night. After rallying their forces for most of
the past year, their campaign to avoid the
"specter of sequestration", as they often refer to
it, shifted into high gear on Capitol Hill this
past week, as top industry executives were
summoned to testify to the urgency of the threat.
At stake could be as much as US$600
billion in Pentagon funding - much of which would
presumably be spent on lucrative procurement
contracts for new weapons systems - over the next
10 years, as well as what
the hawks see as the further erosion of US global
military dominance.
"It is clear that if
the process of sequestration is fully
implemented," warned three of the right's most
hawkish think tanks the American Enterprise
Institute (AEI), the Heritage Foundation, and the
Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) in a joint
statement entitled "Defending Defense" last week,
"the US military will lack adequate resources to
defend the United States and its global
interests".
"The specter of sequestration
threatens the US defense industrial base at a time
when China, Russia, and other military competitors
are ramping up their defense industries,"
according to the statement, which helped raise the
curtain on this week's mantra from the
military-industrial complex: hundreds of thousands
of workers could lose their jobs as early as
October one month before the election unless the
sequestration nightmare goes away.
The
sequestration specter arises from a 2011
agreement, codified in the Budget Control Act,
between President Barack Obama and Republican
Congressional leaders for cutting the yawning US
federal deficit over the next decade.
The
Act provides that if Congress cannot agree on a
specific plan that would cut $1.2 trillion in the
budget by the end of this year, then the cuts
would take place automatically beginning in 2013,
with half of the total taken from the Pentagon and
the rest from non-defense programs.
The
Act was designed to spur both parties to
compromise, since Republicans have generally been
adamantly opposed to cuts in the defense budget,
while Democrats have no less vehemently tried to
protect favored social, educational, and health
programs from the budget axe.
A so-called
super-committee of lawmakers from both parties was
created to forge such a compromise, but their
positions proved irreconcilable. Backed by the
White House, Democrats demanded that deficit
reduction be achieved, at least in part, by
raising taxes on the wealthy, while Republicans
rejected such an approach out of hand.
While most observers believed that a
compromise would eventually be worked out, the
approach of the November elections has resulted in
both parties digging in, and sequestration now
looms as a distinct possibility.
At $645
billion this year, the US defense budget far
exceeds those of the 20 next-most-powerful
countries and accounts altogether for about 40% of
global military spending. Despite the lack of a
peer competitor, the Pentagon's budget has nearly
doubled over the past decade.
While
China's defense budget has been rising at a faster
rate in recent years, it is believed to amount to
no more than a third of what Washington spends.
Nonetheless, hawks have long argued for
increases in the Pentagon's budget and last year
strongly denounced Obama's order to cut more than
$450 billion in previously planned defense
spending over the next decade as part of a larger
strategy to reduce the deficit.
Even
Pentagon chief Leon Panetta has warned that an
additional $600 billion reduction resulting from
sequestration would be "devastating" to
Washington's ability to protect its national
interests overseas, although it remains unclear
whether he sincerely believes that or whether he
is using it to push the Republicans toward
compromise. Some Republicans have charged that
Obama himself would not be displeased if the
sequestration took effect.
Given the
importance of the economy and unemployment in the
November election, Republicans have increasingly
tried to focus attention on the possible job
losses resulting from sequestration and enlisted
the major arms manufacturers - which increased
their spending on lobbying in Washington by an
average of nearly 12% during the first quarter of
this year, according to 'Defense News' - in their
cause.
Last month, the chief executive of
the Pentagon's biggest contractor, Lockheed Martin
Corp, warned that additional cuts would be a
"blunt force trauma" to the industry. He noted
that his company's workforce was already 18%
smaller than three years ago due to a slowdown in
the rise in the defense budget under Obama.
Earlier this week, the Aerospace
Industries Association produced a study that
estimated job losses due to the sequestration cuts
would result in the loss of nearly 1.1 million
jobs in the defense sector next year.
And
on Wednesday, the hawkish chairman of the House
Armed Services Committee, Rep. Howard "Buck"
McKeon, hosted the CEOs of four major defense
contractors in a hearing designed to underline the
threat of mass lay-offs, with notices to workers
going out as early as October 1.
But both
the administration and Congressional Democrats are
insisting that the Republicans compromise on
taxes. Indeed, one Democratic congressman from
Georgia, Rep. Hank Johnson, noted the irony of
Republicans "holding hearings to talk about how
reduced government spending would hurt jobs and
the economy".
According to Politico,
Johnson asked the four whether they would be
personally willing to pay more taxes as part of a
deal to avoid sequestration but received no
answer.
Recent survey data suggest that
the public generally favors the Democratic
position. According to one detailed poll released
here Monday by worldpublicopinion.org, a strong
majority of respondents, including those from
Congressional districts represented by
Republicans, favor substantial cuts to the defense
budget by an average of 18% from its current
level.
The survey, which was carried out
in April, found some partisan differences.
Respondents in Republican districts on average
favored cuts by 15%, while Democratic districts
wanted to cut by 22%, according to the survey,
which was sponsored by the Programme for Public
Consultation, the Stimson Center, and the Center
for Public Integrity.
Particularly
remarkable was the finding that respondents living
in districts benefiting from the highest level of
defense-related spending were just as likely to
support cuts as districts which benefited
relatively little.
Jim Lobe's
blog on US foreign policy can be read at
http://www.lobelog.com.
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