Obama to press Congress to revisit $1.2T in cuts

Andrew Taylor. AP, 20 January 2012.
http://defensealt.org/HbwoVl

Excerpt:

The White House plan, likely to reprise new taxes and fee proposals that are nonstarters with Capitol Hill Republicans, would turn off the entire nine-year, $1.2 trillion across-the-board spending cuts, referred to as a “sequester.”

“We have a sequester coming less than a year from now unless Congress acts,” said a senior administration official. “We’re going to ask Congress to do now what we think Congress should have done in December, which is enact more than $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction, turn off the sequester and maintain the (spending caps).”

Sequester Not All It’s Cracked Up to Be

DefenseTracker.com, 18 January 2012.
http://defensetracker.com/web/?p=1681

Excerpt:

Part of the “Doomsday Mechanism” hysteria spread by Defense Secretary Panetta and his comrade in the budget wars, Cong. Buck McKeon, has been the automaticity of the across-the-boards cuts that sequester would impose on the defense budget next January–in the likely event that the lame duck Congress and its successor next year will both be as dysfunctional as the can of red and blue worms we have now. (The other part of the hysteria is the “horror” of returning to 2007 levels of base budget defense spending.)

It seems that the president has existing statutory authority to modify the sequester mechanism–but not the amount of cuts required.

Outside In: Defeating Iran’s Anti-Access and Area-Denial Threat

Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 17 January 2012.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/78566480/Defeating-Iran-s-Anti-Access-Weapons

Key Risks in the New Defense Guidance: What Kind of War and Where?

Nathan Freier. Center for Strategic and International Studies, 17 January 2012.
http://defensealt.org/KAW4AS

Excerpt:

Like any change in strategy, however, the new approach has risk embedded in it. One of the more prominent risks involves the wholly predictable and complete triumph of classical realism in DoD’s future outlook. It appears that high-tech war between states is back in vogue as the single most important core planning scenario; this at a time when war within important states may be increasingly likely and, depending on location, equally impactful. How defense leaders account for and manage this risk will determine whether or not the guidance survives first contact with global uncertainty.

Keeping a Competitive U.S. Military Aircraft Industry Aloft

John Birkler, Paul Bracken, Gordon T. Lee, Mark A. Lorell, Soumen Saha and Shane Tierney. RAND, 16 January, 2012.
http://defensealt.org/J83lFJ

Excerpt:

For at least two decades, policymakers have expressed concerns that further consolidation could erode the competitive environment for military aircraft and degrade the industry’s abilities to develop, manufacture, and support innovative designs. The authors find that only by involving two prime contractors equally in performing RDT&E (research, development, test, and evaluation) on a new large program, such as a bomber, could DoD sustain two firms through 2020 with RDT&E funding and through 2025 with procurement funding.

No Need for All These Nukes

Philip Taubman. New York Times, 08 January 2012.
http://defensealt.org/ylGVmd

Excerpt:

If the president pushes back against the defenders of the old order at the Pentagon and other redoubts of the nuclear priesthood, he can preserve American security while making the United States a more credible leader on one of today’s most critical issues — containing the spread of nuclear weapons. Like a chain smoker asking others to give up cigarettes, the United States, with its bloated arsenal, sounds hypocritical when it puts pressure on other nations to cut weapons and stop producing bomb-grade highly enriched uranium…

Related:

Defense Strategy Review Page Nuclear Debate