The Hill News

In a mid-October speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, new Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta lamented that under his watch, the Pentagon would have to make “some very hard choices... to reduce its projected spending by more than $450 billion” over the next ten years.

Sorry Mr. Secretary, the country needs just a little more than you're offering. Then again, you're not off by much: The worst outcome is if the Congressional “supercommittee”, given a mandate to negotiate a grand bargain to get our national finances on track, fails. Without bipartisan compromise by the new year, Congress has pre-approved a “sequester” option that would be automatically triggered and slash $850 billion-$1 trillion from DOD's budget as part of across-the-board spending cuts.

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