There is a growing sense among defense-budget watchers that the U.S. military and its political masters are pretending the shave the armed forces just got from sequestration’s blade isn’t going to lead to decapitation in what Pentagon dweebs like to call the “out-years,” and what normal folks call the “future.”
But takers of political temperatures don’t see sequestration being reversed. That means this year’s 10% budget trim and budget ceiling could well last for years.
“This chart graphically explains the denial that exists in the defense budget right now,” says chart creator Todd Harrison, chief budget dweeb at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “The Pentagon, White House, and Congress are all planning as if the defense budget will jump back next year like sequestration never happened.”
Harrison isn’t betting the farm on that happy outcome. “The reality is that the budget caps remain in effect, and the mechanism of sequestration applies to fiscal year 2014 and beyond if the budget caps are exceeded,” he says. “Moreover, Congress and the White House are no closer to reaching a compromise to alter or eliminate the budget caps now than they were in August of 2011 when the Budget Control Act was passed. They thought it would never happen for fiscal year 2013, yet it did. Now they are talking the same way about fiscal year 2014.”
It’s almost like the U.S. military is acting like uniformed lemmings. Or uniformed lemmings. Or both…