The Mayan calendar implies that the world is going to end this December—but the defense industry seems to be holding out for Jan. 2. That’s when the Department of Defense will start getting hit by about $500 billion in across-the-board cuts (also known as "sequestration"), spread out over the next decade (unless Congress manages to intervene.)
Listening to the big contractors, you’d think sequestration was the first sign of the apocalypse. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has called the cuts a “doomsday scenario.” And collectively, the top five U.S. defense contractors have already ramped up their spending on lobbying by 11.5 percent compared to last year, according to NextGov.
Lockheed Martin, the largest U.S. defense contractor, is also threatening to lay off thousands upon thousands of workers, a move that experts—including Project On Government Oversight national security expert Ben Freeman—are calling a “political stunt” intended to push Congress to act.
According to Freeman, defense contractors may be playing Chicken Little, but they have plenty of revenue to fall back on. Even if contractors bore every single sequestration cut, they’d still be getting “more than $300 billion a year from taxpayers.”
If Panetta is really so concerned that sequestration is going to lead to an apocalyptic scenario, maybe he should start looking at the tremendous amount of taxpayer dollars wasted on contracting, instead of promising to preserve “the health and viability of the nation's defense industrial base." Not to mention, he could start cutting the other hugely wasteful weapons programs POGO has outlined.
No one actually wants sequestration. But as POGO’s Winslow Wheeler tells me, even in a worst-case scenario, Pentagon spending will drop to a level that is still three times that of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and Syria—combined, and still $30 billion above what the U.S. spent on average during the Cold War.
“It is a historically generous amount of spending for the Defense Department,” says Wheeler. “However, no one in Congress seems willing to stand up to the defense corporations.”
We’ve designed this handy chart to help you decide whether or not you’re on the defense contractor apocalypse train—or if you’re thinking rationally about defense spending. As Robert Frost would (maybe) write, “some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice…and contractors say it’s taking five dollars away from the F-35 fighter jet.”
Dana Liebelson is the Beth Daley Impact Fellow at the Project On Government Oversight.
Perhaps if we cut the defense budget enough the military will start paying contractors more to develop weapons on-time and on-budget than they do if the contractor screws up and drags out development for decades and produces a crappy yet expensive weapons that don't work until the 3rd or 4th follow on contract has squeezed the final dime possible out of the US taxpayer. Or we can continue to throw money at defense like we have for the last 20 years, because that's worked out so damn well -- for the corporate CEO's of the defense companies.
Posted by: Dfens | Jul 18, 2012 at 06:59 PM
I love DFens quoting Winslow Wheeler. This is the first comment by him that I agree with. Keep it coming.
Posted by: No cool name to call myself | Jul 18, 2012 at 05:20 AM
Dana--a $30 bil difference, inflation-adjusted or not, is well within the error term of this kind of analysis. So, the point holds no particular water. But please keep working the problem.
Stepping back just a bit--and not sequestered in a defense plant like Ms./Mr. DFENS,--the issue is simply that they (the MIC, especially the flags and some of the larger firms) fear is Castration, rather than Sequestration.
Posted by: Bloviaticus | Jul 17, 2012 at 06:33 PM
"Pentagon spending will drop to a level that is ... still $30 billion above what the U.S. spent on average during the Cold War."
Wow, excellent statistic! That pretty much says it all. 20 years after the end of the Cold War and our military defense is on the verge of collapse if spending is not maintained at well above peak Cold War levels. Yet every day I work in a defense plant that proudly waves the flags of every country they've managed to outsource production of our military airplanes to. As Mr. Wheeler has often stated in his articles, we need to be getting more for less when it comes to defense. We should be demanding we get more jobs domestically for those dollars spent, and we should be getting much more bang for the buck.
Posted by: Dfens | Jul 17, 2012 at 05:32 PM