Debt Ceiling Deal That Cuts Trillions, Creates 'Super Congress' Announced By Party Leaders

“We just don’t know how that will play out yet,” says GordonAdam­s, a senior WhiteHouse budget official for national security in the ClintonAdm­inistratio­n.

Now, in the medium term, assume that the Pentagon does have to take a $350 billion hit over 10 years. That’s not significan­tly different from President Obama’s budget proposal this year, which called for $400 billion worth of defense cuts over 12 years. At a Thursday hearing at the House Armed Services Committee, the vice chiefs of the Army, Navy and Air Force argued that that was about the outer limit of what they could handle.

An April analysis from the Stimson Center, on the other hand, argued that a $400 billion defense cut from the baseline over 10 years would essentiall­y mean letting the Pentagon’s budget grow with inflation starting in 2011 — and that’s not much of a cut at all, given the massive run-up in defense spending over the past decade. To put that in perspectiv­e, says Center for American Progress defense analyst Larry Korb, “We’re already spending more in adjusted dollars than we have at any point during World War II — more than when we were in Vietnam and had 500,000 people on the ground.”

Of course, there’s still the potential for deeper cuts. Under the debt deal, if the new “super committee” fails to pass its deficit plan, then $1.2 trillion of cuts come down, of which roughly half fall on security — though, again, the details would be left to Congress. That would bring us into the world contemplat­ed by Tom Coburn, in which defense faces nearly $1 trillion in cuts over the next decade. That would certainly garner hostility from defense hawks. But it would also put us squarely in the historical norm.

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