No Plans

The Pentagon is not planning for potential sequestration cuts because it does not want to end up having to face the effects of its plans, a senior defense official said.

During a Bloomberg Government defense conference in Washington today, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Zachary Lemnios said the department is not planning for potentially hundreds of billions of dollars of cuts from sequestration “because if you do, you sort of end up on that slope. And the secretary has made that point and we’re absolutely clear on that.”

Lemnios said the two chambers of Congress and the administration have to work together to solve the crisis. “It has to happen in that fashion rather than in this glide slope that ends up being a precipice that no body wants to be in,” Lemnios said.

He argued that it would be much more productive to spend the administration’s energy on proposing a solution rather than planning for a set of options that could possibly not happen.

During the session, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) said he was completely puzzled by the Pentagon’s refusal to plan, contending that it was more political in nature than substantive. He said he and his colleagues on the House Armed Services Committee have pressed officials on the issue of what happens when sequestration gets triggered in January. Brooks said the administration responded that the Defense Department was going to start terminating contracts for the convenience of the government or renegotiating them.

“I would encourage the White House to start planning and the Pentagon to be freed from this restraint so that they can start planning, and most importantly so that they will be in a position where they can describe to the public the adverse affects of sequestration, so the public can make perhaps some informed decisions on the election day in November,” Brooks said.

He anticipated seeing massive numbers of industry layoffs due to these cuts.

Brooks laid out some scenarios that could occur to meet the sequestration funding levels: mothballing one or two carrier battle groups; mothballing one or two submarines; or mothballing a significant percentage of the fighter and bomber capabilities.

Lemnios did note that the Pentagon is planning for a future research and engineering portfolio that is more tightly coupled with academia and with industry.