The country’s top uniformed military officer said Tuesday the Defense Department could not $52 billion from its fiscal year 2014 budget under sequestration because it did not have enough time to prepare for the cuts, The Hill newspaper reports.
Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the March 1 date came too late for the Pentagon to prepare a separate budget that incorporates the cuts, Jeremy Herb writes.
“It was a practical matter of literally what was possible for us to ask the services to do,” Dempsey told reporters at a lunch hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, according to the report.
Herb reports the Pentagon asked Congress for $526 billion in base funds for fiscal 2014, $52 billion above spending caps set under the sequester.
Wow… For months the official position of the DoD was that it would not plan for sequester — the Secretary of Defense expressly forbade it — because he said it was a dumb idea that would not actually happen. DoD leaders cannot now say they did not have enough time to prepare. They had plenty of time to prepare if they did not squandering it pretending the threat did not exist. I shudder to think what other threats are out there that we are choosing not to prepare for.