(1) I don't know whether this article's headline is accurate or not; I'd like to think it is.
(2) IMHO, root causes of sequestration issue lie with POTUS who suggested concept, Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction which failed to do their job, and both parties of both houses of Congress who have failed to pass a budget.
(3) DoD, particularly SECDEF, CJCS, and Service Chiefs, IMHO has/have credibility problems because early in the process, they were all shouting [****], probably politically directed, that DoD should be a participant in deficit reduction.
(4) Lack of planning, while mandated by OMB, is inexcusable. Secret planning and wargaming goes on in DoD all the time. This could have been handled with a few people working in a vault with an offline computer. That would have postured DoD to issue the statutory furlough notices to DoD employees several weeks ago.
(5) While I know some DoD employees will disagree with me from a personal cash flow perspective, I think that now that sequestration is upon the USG, if not resolved by 01 March, the best thing to do would be to shut down the government on that date for 22 days while documenting and aggressively publicizing in graphic detail the effects. And there would be effects — people would die, air traffic system would probably shut down, criminals would run rampant, important things would not happen, bills would go unpaid, and the list would go on and on. That ((MIGHT)) seer into public and officeholder minds the inadvisibility of every doing this kind of thing again).
The Washington Times, Sunday, February 17, 2013
The Obama administration is putting attention-getting Pentagon projects on the chopping block in a bid to pressure Congress into making a deal that avoids $46 billion in military budget cuts March 1, analysts and congressional officials say.
They use terms such as “gold watches,” “hot button” and “Washington Monumenting” to describe the cuts outlined over the past two weeks by the chiefs of the Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, Navy and National Guard in briefings and hearings.
