Pentagon Sides With White House Against Eliminating Automatic Cuts

The Pentagon is wading into the political fight over how to close the nation’s yawning budget deficit, with senior officials indicating that they oppose the growing congressional efforts to shield the Defense Department from the hundreds of billions of dollars of mandatory cuts triggered by the failure of the congressional super committee.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta supports the Obama administration's hardline position about legislation designed to protect the Pentagon from up to $600 billion in sweeping cuts, Pentagon spokesman George Little told reporters on Friday.  The White House has promised to veto any bills shielding Defense from those cuts, arguing that spending reductions of that size shouldn’t solely be imposed—as many Republicans want—on domestic programs like Social Security and Medicare.

“The secretary supports the president’s view on this, on the so-called detriggering mechanism,” Little told reporters.

The new comments are likely to attract particular attention on Capitol Hill given Panetta’s frequent previous warnings that the cuts—coming on top of an already-announced $450 billion in reductions over the next 12 years—would devastate the nation’s armed forces.

“I’ve been railing about the threat of budget sequestration.  I know the challenges of the budget.  I’ve worked with the budget.  I know what budgets are all about,” Panetta said during a speech on Wednesday night.  “But when there’s a mechanism like sequestration, which is this kind of blind meat-ax approach to putting that in place if you don’t do the right thing, there’s something wrong … if it happens, it could do lasting damage, obviously, to defense policy in this country.  And it will.”

Panetta has made a similar point before. In the immediate aftermath of the super committee failure, he had said Congress should "avoid an easy way out of this crisis" and that lawmakers "cannot simply turn off the sequester mechanism."

Still, Little’s comments on Friday marked the first time a senior Pentagon official weighed in on the politically sensitive issue since significant momentum began to build in both the House and Senate to remove the mandatory cuts.  

In the weeks before the super committee dissolved without a deal, Panetta and the Joint Chiefs of Staff publicly described the spending reductions as “catastrophic” and likely to do “irreversible damage” to U.S. national security. Panetta himself recently said they’d turn the U.S. military into a “paper tiger” and “invite aggression” from hostile countries.

Hawkish GOP lawmakers have been pointing to such comments as part of their case for stripping out the sequestration language. In the House, California Republican Rep. Buck McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said last week that he’d introduce legislation to eliminate the spending cuts and specifically cited Panetta’s warnings about their impact on the military.

“Secretary Panetta has said he doesn't want to be the secretary who hollows out defense,” McKeon said in a written statement. “Likewise, I will not be the Armed Services chairman who presides over crippling our military. I will not let these sequestration cuts stand.”

A similar effort is under way in the Senate, where Republicans John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have said they’d support legislative efforts to shield the Pentagon and again pointed to the warnings from Panetta and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“As every military and civilian defense official has stated, these cuts represent a threat to the national security interests of the United States, and cannot be allowed to occur,” McCain and Graham said in a joint statement.

The super committee’s failure to reach a deal means the budget fight will be shifting back to the full House and Senate, where election-year politics could make the debates even more heated—and the prospect of an agreement even more remote. With the Pentagon certain to be dragged into the squabbling, this week won’t be the last time Panetta and his aides are forced to wade into the debate.