Killing Leaky Ships, Costly Planes Won’t Save Pentagon

So we have reached the eve of sequestration, with the Pentagon facing a $43 billion, one-year budget hit called for in the 2011 debt-ceiling agreement. Don’t fret. Despite warnings from outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta that sequestration is “a disaster for national defense,” B-2 bombers won’t fall from the sky and Canada won’t invade any time soon.

In defense terms, the real problem with these cuts is their lack of precision -- as decreed by Congress and the Office of Management and Budget, they must be made evenly across all programs and accounts (with the exception of personnel pay, which was exempted by President Barack Obama, and which we’ll return to later).