Do Not Cripple Our Defense!

I don't think I have ever read a George Will column without having to look up the meaning of one of the words he used in his column. I certainly have heard of the term sequester, as it relates to juries, for example. But in his most recent column Will talks about a sequester of the defense budget that would "take from military budgets nearly $500 billion, in addition to a minimum of $350 billion in cuts already scheduled." Will adds:

The 1.5 million active-duty members of the armed services and 700,000 civilian employees of the Defense Department depend on an industrial base of more than 3.8 million persons. According to the Pentagon, a sequester would substantially shrink those three numbers, perhaps adding a point to the nation’s unemployment rate. The cuts would leave the smallest Army and Marine Corps in more than a decade and the smallest tactical Air Force since this service became independent of the Army in 1947. The Navy has already shrunk almost to its smallest fleet size since World War I.

I agree with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who told Will, "That can't happen!" but so-called Tea Partiers "live to slow spending, period. They are constitutionalists but insufficiently attentive to the fact that defense is something the federal government does that it actually should do."

Panetta says that the Pentagon is already under 24 hour a day cyber-seige.

There constantly are thousands of what he calls “exploitive” cyber probes from nations “pulsing the system,” trying to devise tools to disrupt the control systems without which complex societies such as ours cannot function. Panetta, a seasoned Washingtonian who laughs easily and a temperate Californian who frets about the San Francisco Giants’ bats, is not given to hyperbole. But he says any cyber attack that “crippled our [electricity] grid or took down our financial system would make Pearl Harbor and 9/11 combined look mild” in terms of social disruption.

Other worries?

Although a cyber attack “is moving up” on his list of his worries, it ranks only “third or fourth,” behind North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear weapons programs; what he calls terrorism “nodes” in places such as Yemen, Somalia and North Africa; and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Iraq, the mission of the remnant of U.S. forces — the number 3,000 has been bruited — will, Panetta says, include counterterrorism actions “working with the Iraqis.” Which leaves a lot of room for danger.