![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/hires_130301-D-NI589-063d-1024x682.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Less than a week. That’s how long it took for Hagel to start toeing the Obama line on sequestration, contradicting his now infamous prior statement<\/a> that the Pentagon is “bloated” and “needs to be pared down.”<\/p>\n Antiwar voices that got excited over Hagel’s nomination pointed to these quotations favorably. And political commentators suggested President Obama’s rationale for nominating the Republican Chuck Hagel to be Defense Secretary was strategic: he could safely advocate and implement seemingly inevitable cuts to military budgets.<\/p>\n On Wednesday of last week, the day he was sworn in, Hagel told an audience<\/a> in a speech at the Pentagon that the sequester “is a reality,\u201d and that, \u201cWe need to figure this out.\u201d<\/p>\n But now, as The Washington Times<\/em> reports<\/a>, Hagel is “warn[ing] against cuts.” According to the Defense Department’s website, Hagel warned<\/a> that\u00a0sequestration \u201cputs at risk our ability to effectively fulfill all of our missions.\u201d He urged Congress to come up with “a\u00a0plan that leads to an end to sequestration.”<\/p>\n \u201cLeadership in the Pentagon \u2026 [has] two serious concerns: first, the abrupt and arbitrary cuts imposed by sequester; and second, the lack of budget management flexibility that we now face under the current continuing resolution,\u201d Hagel said.<\/p>\n The department has already had to cut funding for readiness, he said. \u201cAs sequester continues, we will be forced to assume more risk, with steps that will progressively have far-reaching effects,\u201d the secretary said.<\/p>\n …\u201cIf sequester continues and the continuing resolution is extended in its current form, other damaging effects will become apparent,\u201d Hagel said<\/p><\/blockquote>\n To be fair, it’s quite possible that Hagel is just reading scripted lines intended to make it seem like the Obama administration had the sequester forced upon it. Much of the debate about budget cuts has been characterized by this skirting-the-blame rhetoric.<\/p>\n But his comments demanding “an end” to the “abrupt and arbitrary cuts” are dishonest on another level: the sequester is not harmful<\/a> to national security or to our military “readiness<\/a>.” The “cuts” are puny. And they are not even cuts – they are gradual reductions in the rate of growth in spending on what Hagel very recently described as “bloated,” “wasteful,” and in need of some paring down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Less than a week. That’s how long it took for Hagel to start toeing the Obama line on sequestration, contradicting his now infamous prior statement that the Pentagon is “bloated” and “needs to be pared down.” Antiwar voices that got excited over Hagel’s nomination pointed to these quotations favorably. And political commentators suggested President Obama’s […]<\/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-18533","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\/18533","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=18533"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18540,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18533\/revisions\/18540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18533"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=18533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}