Rapid Fire 2012-01-09 | Budget Cuts: Not Just How Much, But How

* The Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) and Professional Services Council (PSC), teamed up as the “Defense Industrial Base Task Force”, sent a joint letter [PDF] to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to outline what they think the impact of budget cuts might be. More subtle than past communications that threatened with the loss of 1 million jobs, the document states that subcontractors may choose to leave the defense market, forcing primes to in-source functions that they currently subcontract. This shows how the discussion has shifted from “should there be any cuts at all” to “how to execute cuts in a responsible way.” Where, and when, matter as much as how much. * Panetta doesn’t need much convincing though. Neither the FY13 budget in the works nor the Pentagon strategy update from last week plan around the execution of full sequestration. The Secretary told NPR: “if we had to do over a trillion dollars in cuts in this department, I have to tell you that the strategy that we developed, we’d probably have to throw that out the window and start over.” The key element that seems to differentiate President Obama’s defense strategy from Donald Rumsfeld’s […]