{"id":15139,"date":"2012-05-23T05:31:29","date_gmt":"2012-05-23T13:31:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=15139"},"modified":"2012-05-23T05:34:24","modified_gmt":"2012-05-23T13:34:24","slug":"military-planners-ordered-to-not-consider-sequestration-cuts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/23\/military-planners-ordered-to-not-consider-sequestration-cuts\/","title":{"rendered":"Military Planners Ordered to Not Consider Sequestration Cuts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Under statutory mandates, Congress is required to impose automatic budget cuts if an agreement on &#8220;debt reduction&#8221; is not reached. It is already clear Congress is ignoring its own self-imposed requirements, which <a href=\"http:\/\/news.antiwar.com\/2012\/05\/10\/survey-huge-majority-of-americans-support-defense-cuts-given-budget-data\/\">Americans overwhelmingly support<\/a>. As <a href=\"http:\/\/news.antiwar.com\/2012\/05\/18\/house-oks-indefinite-definition-of-terror-suspects\/\">I recently wrote<\/a>: &#8220;Essentially, Congress mandated action on cutting spending by force of law, and then ignored their own legislative mandates. A more\u00a0illustrative example of lawlessness is hard to find.&#8221; Well, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtontimes.com\/news\/2012\/may\/20\/how-to-cut-600b-not-on-the-radar-at-pentagon\/\">I may have found it<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Military planners are under strict orders not to devise scenarios for meeting the demands of \u201csequestration,\u201d as the automatic, across-the-board spending reductions are called. Such paperwork, if leaked, would tell Congress there might be a way to deal with such drastic cuts.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;\u201cThey said they had all been ordered not to. It would be a violation. It would be a crime,\u201d one participant told The Times.<\/p>\n<p>An Army officer said, according to the participant: \u201cI would be disobeying orders. I would be violating my orders and essentially committing a criminal act if I did any analytics on sequestration at this point.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Remember, this is <a href=\"http:\/\/news.antiwar.com\/2012\/04\/11\/military-fears-minuscule-cuts-to-defense-budget\/\">not about slashing budgets<\/a>, but rather about a decision to <em>slow the rate of growth<\/em> in defense spending.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Under statutory mandates, Congress is required to impose automatic budget cuts if an agreement on &#8220;debt reduction&#8221; is not reached. It is already clear Congress is ignoring its own self-imposed requirements, which Americans overwhelmingly support. As I recently wrote: &#8220;Essentially, Congress mandated action on cutting spending by force of law, and then ignored their own [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-15139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15139"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15144,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15139\/revisions\/15144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15139"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=15139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}