On the Thursday before the nation mourned its dead from the largest terrorist attack on the United States, the specially selected "supercommittee" of six senators and six congressmen met for the first time to do the job for which 535 of them had been elected but had failed to do — make the budget cuts that were part of the debt ceiling deal.
Failure by this 12-member Joint Committee of Congress to come up with $1.5 trillion in cuts would trigger an automatic across-the-board sequestration process that would make half the cuts at the expense of the defense of this nation. Either way, defense gets hit hard, since these cuts come on top of $350 billion in defense cuts already announced.
Firing a shot across the committee's bow was Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., who announced to a conservative group Thursday, "I'm off the committee if we're going to talk about further defense cuts."
Whether agreed on by the committee or triggered by a failure to reach a deal, further cuts coming at a time of increasing threats from rogue states such as North Korea and Iran, the rearming of traditional foes like Russia and an increasingly belligerent China make no sense. Throw in Afghanistan and the war on terror, and they get outright dangerous.
Kyl knows the Democrats will not agree to cut the obscene growth rate of entitlement programs such as Medicare or Social Security, an area where the real problem resides. They will not agree to a GOP proposal to return across-the-board nonsecurity spending to 2008 levels, but are quite willing to gut defense by returning spending there to 2007 levels.
This nonsense is opposed by defense secretaries past and present. In a joint appearance recently with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the National Defense University, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, to his credit, begged to differ with her assessment that to reduce the deficit "everything," including defense spending, had to be on the table.
"Very simply, it would result in hollowing out the force," he said of further reductions, alluding to reductions made in the aftermath of the Vietnam War that left Army units undermanned and ill-equipped. "It would terribly weaken our ability to respond to the threats in the world."
"The Department of Defense is not what's causing the debt and the deficit. It's the entitlement programs," former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in an interview with Human Events. "If we make that mistake, we're doomed to suffer another attack of some kind, and our intelligence will be less strong and less effective."
Weakness invites attack and adventurism from our adversaries. Rumsfeld stressed that the military cuts looming today may be similarly disastrous to those that occurred at the end of the Cold War — a precursor, he claims, to creating the vulnerable environment that bred 9/11. There can be no peace dividend when there is no peace.
Looking at the huge percentage increases in nonsecurity spending just since 2008 shows defense is not the culprit for our rising debt. Indeed, defense spending creates jobs from naval shipyards to fighter assembly lines. Defense cuts have already increased unemployment and stunted revenues.
Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, President Obama's choice to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in written statements released to coincide with his recent confirmation hearings, "National security didn't cause the debt crisis, nor will it solve it."
Aside from the costs of fighting two wars, the defense budget is stagnant, even shrinking, in the face of rising global threats.
It hit a postwar high of 14.2% of GDP in 1953 during the Korean War, was 9.5% in 1968 at the height of Vietnam and stood at 6.8% in 1986 at the height of the Reagan buildup that doomed the evil empire and won the Cold War.
The Obama administration's projected budgets have the defense burden shrinking in the decade ahead to less than 3% of GDP — a level not seen since before World War II.
There are plenty of other places to cut. To paraphrase a saying from early in our history: Billions for defense, but not one cent for ObamaCare.
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