Invite your attention to pages 5 thru 7 of attached which outlines in very clear terms the likely FY 2013 and longer term impacts on the Department of Defense and the Joint Force of the impending sequester brought about by this week's dereliction of duty on the part of the Senators and Representatives making up the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.
SecDef Panetta to Senator McCain on Sequester (PDF 2 pages)
Phi Beta Iota: Panetta-McCain may be the toxic replacment to Cheney-Warner. The letter is without merit. The acquisition system is so broken now the Navy and Army cannot build anything coherently–the Navy still lacks Naval Gun Fire and the Army still lacks an infantry weapon able to out-gun the Taliban, while the Air Force continues to stink at close air support and lack both an intra-theater adequacy of lift and a long-haul heavy lift capability (or the ability to be effective above 6,000 ft). DoD, in short, is a mis-managed mess and Panetta has no idea how to go about fixing that, nor does he want to. Lockheed Martin and others are quite happy with the way things are, where 50% of every dollar is waste but that waste is profit for them because it includes their overhead. It is true that the current laws mandated by Congress make it difficult for any Cabinet Secretary to cut waste–this is the same Congress that mandated we pay 100% asking price for Medicare drugs instead of the more common global standard of 2% for generic wholesale. As long as Congress remains corrupt, and the SecDef remains corrupt, there is no fixing this problem. The FACT is that we have to cut one trillion a year (what we are borrowing), not one trillion over ten years. The FACT is that DoD would be much stronger if it could combine both intelligence and integrity and actually create the four forces after next, at a much reduced cost, that those with intelligence and integrity have been discussing for decades, and with greater intensity, since the mid-1990's.
See Also:
2011 Thinking About Revolution in the USA and Elsewhere (Full Text Online for Google Translate)
2008 Rebalancing the Instruments of National Power (Full Text Online for Google Translate)
2008 U.S. Naval Power in the 21st Century
2010: Human Intelligence (HUMINT) Trilogy Updated
2009 Intelligence for the President–AND Everyone Else
2009 Fixing the White House & National Intelligence
2009 Human Intelligence: All Humans, All Minds, All the Time
2009 Perhaps We Should Have Shouted: A Twenty-Year Retrospective
2008: Creating a Smart Nation (Full Text Online for Google Translate)
2008 Chapter: Paradigms of Failure
2008 Election 2008: Balanced Budget 101
2006 Sutton (US) Global Coverage, Looking Backward, Looking Forward
2006 The Failure of 21st Century Intelligence (Followed by SPY IMPROV)
2002 Jongman (NL) World Conflict & Human Rights Map 2001/2002
2001 Threats, Strategy, and Force Structure: An Alternative Paradigm for National Security
2000 Cox (CA) Reflections of the former NATO Deputy N-2
2000 Presidential Intelligence (Book 1 Chapter 13)
2000 Presidential Leadership and National Security Policy Making
1998 JFQ The Asymmetric Threat: Listening to the Debate
1997 Sutton (US) The Challenge of Global Coverage
1997 Intelligence and Counterintelligence: Proposed Program for the 21st Century
1961-2011: 50 Years of The Military-Industrial Complex
Bob Gates, Chief Maintenance Clerk, Talks Crap — and the Wall Street Journal Goes Along…
Chuck Spinney: Bin Laden, Perpetual War, Total Cost + Perpetual War RECAP
Chuck Spinney: Economic Costs of Warmongering
DefDog: Over-Stating China – Close Down PACOM + RECAP
Defense Science Board to DoD: Get Brain + RECAP
G.I. Wilson: Killer Drones, Moral Disengagement, + War Crimes RECAP
Graphic: Corruption Slide 3 Holistic Analysis
Graphic: Four Forces After Next with IO
Graphic: Four National Reforms
Graphic: Intelligence Maturity Scale
Graphic: Medard Gabel’s Cost of Peace versus War
Graphic: Principles of War versus Principles of Peace
Graphic: Reality 102 Strategic Forces Being Ignored
Graphic: US Defense Spending 2000-2011 ($B)
Graphic: US DoD Budget 1948-2011
Graphic: US Dollar Decline (4 Periods Compared)
Integrity Emergent: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
Marcus Aurelius: US at Permanent “War” + War RECAP
Obama in a Strategic & Intellectual Vacuum
Reference: Cutting the Defense Budget + RECAP
Reference: Frog 6 Guidance 2010-2020
Reference: Invisible Empire New World Order DVD + RECAP
Reference: On WikiLeaks and Government Secrecy + RECAP on Secrecy as Fraud, Waste, & Abuse
Ric Merrifield: When Metrics & Assumptions Are Wrong
Search: smart nation intelligence reform electoral reform national security reform
Tax Cuts & Elective Wars Created the Deficit….
Todd Essig: Huge Psychological Bias Against Creativity
USA National Military Strategy 2011 + RECAP
Winslow Wheeler: Military Spending versus Competence
For those interested in how Vice President Dick Cheney might go about destroying intelligence reform in the aftermath of the 9-11 Commission report, this document provides the full text of the two letters he used to destroy intelligence reform in 1992, when the Senate and House intelligence committees were in full agreement that substantive reform was needed.
SecDef Dick Cheney's Two Letters Killing Intelligence Reform in 1992
