We’re cutting close to $500 billion out of the next decade’s defense spending. Then there’s another $500 billion to come if sequestration occurs next January because Congress can’t come up with $1.2 trillion in cuts or tax hikes, or some combo of both, over the coming decade.
That prospect of $1 trillion coming out of the defense budget – returning it to 2007’s level – has led to some rhetoric:
We would no longer be a global power.
— Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Feb. 28.
That’s led to some quotes:
The net effect, as Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, is that the United States will no longer be a global power.
— The Weekly Standard, March 26
Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has made plain the consequences of sequestration: “We would no longer be a global power.”
— Wall Street Journal op-ed, March 27
Best to put out this fire before it becomes a conflagration:
The idea that I really wanted to get across was that we wouldn’t be the global power that we know ourselves to be today.
— Dempsey, March 28