

The Pentagon's new, slimmed-down budget is an agent of unity, bringing together Republicans and Democrats alike. Senators of every political stripe on the Armed Services Committee hate the thing – or don't want to defend it. The only thing they may hate more: the next round of Pentagon cuts, due to take effect in less than 11 months.

Instead, at a Tuesday hearing of the committee, there was the opening salvo in a political and legislative battle that's going to consume the Pentagon in 2012. Everyone agrees that an additional and allegedly automatic round of Pentagon budget cuts, mandated by Congress last year and scheduled to take effect in January 2013, will absolutely suck. They suck because Congress designed them to suck – in order to force Congress to pass a broader deficit reduction package, one that balances tax hikes, cuts to entitlement programs and defense cuts.

But hawks on the panel want the Pentagon to be the exception to so-called sequestration, sparing its budget, before it adds at least another $600 billion in decade-long cuts to the $487 billion the Pentagon has already chopped out. And Panetta may have given them some top cover.

"Domestic politics is taking priority over national security," thundered Sen. John McCain, the top Republican on the committee. McCain has proposed passing a bill to explicitly carve out defense from sequestration, a political move by hawks that was forecasted months ago. Obama opposes it. "Why doesn't the president sit down" with Congress, McCain asked Panetta, "and work out a way to avoid what you have described as catastrophic consequences for national security?"

Panetta dodged. But he got a barrage of criticism on his new, $613.9 billion budget, and a ton of anxiety about the additional cuts mandated under sequestration. The reductions in the budget – 2.5 percent, when counting war costs, from last year– already represent an "unacceptable risk to our national security," judged Sen. Joe Lieberman. Sen. Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican, wanted to know Panetta's "strategy to de-trigger sequester." Not a single senator had Panetta's back on the budget.

Panetta was evidently frustrated. Every single one of the senators who criticized the budget and bemoaned sequestration voted for the Budget Control Act that mandated it. "I'm abiding by the law, the law that was passed by Congress," Panetta replied. "At some point the congress and the president have to address this larger issue. What I'm doing here is doing my part."

But neither Panetta nor Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, backed away from their dire rhetoric on sequestration. "Sequestration has this frankly mindless formula already built into it and cuts across the board," Panetta said, "it's not like we can take sequestration and make sense out of the damn thing." Dempsey said the cuts under sequestration would require to the military to cut deeply into operations, maintenance and training. "That's the definition of a hollow force," the chairman said.

And that's by design. Congress and President Obama made defense sequestration a "meat axe" (in Panetta's phrase) so it would to force Congress to cut the budget in a way that spreads pain across socio-economic classes. But the legislative body that was supposed to create such a plan failed. When it did, both Obama and Panetta insisted that Congress couldn't carve out the Pentagon from sequestration. Instead, it had to stick to its original deficit-cutting goals – with Pentagon sequestration acting as the gun to legislators' heads.

But Panetta may have backed away from that. "Congress must do everything possible to make sure we avoid sequestration," Panetta said. "We are more than prepared to work with Congress on approach to de-trigger sequestration." He said that shortly after McCain implored him to join in exempting the Pentagon from "automatic" budget cuts.

It's a little unclear if Panetta meant he would endorse a congressional effort to roll sequestration back. Later in the hearing, he suggested that passing Obama's budget would be a good step for preempting sequestration. But it also sounded like a shift away from Panetta's line in November that "Congress cannot simply turn off the sequester mechanism."

Expect some clarification tomorrow, when Panetta and Dempsey take their budget to the House Armed Services Committee. That committee is controlled by Republicans and defense hawks who hate sequestration even more than does its Senate counterparts. And this week's hearings are just the opening volley of a fight over the scope of defense cuts between the Pentagon and the Hill that will dominate 2012.

Photo: U.S. Air Force