For a department that has been living high on the hog for a decade, it's hard to feel too sympathetic. The DoD had the luxury is ignoring contractors who wasted billions yet continued to do business with them, so maybe it's time Panetta and the Pentagon figure out a way to care more about taxpayer money. Panetta can cry all he wants but he's ignoring the belt tightening across America by families who are struggling. People are tired of a decade of war and the eagerness to get involved in more wars.
Maybe it's time Panetta visits a few working families who don't have deep links into defense contractors. He may have not noticed it while in the comfy confines of his office, but the wars are killing the budget and are responsible for many of the economic problems that the country is facing these days.
Panetta, who has used apocalyptic terms such as "doomsday," ''hollow force" and "paper tiger" to describe the cuts, said the military would have to rethink its strategy.
"We would have to formulate a new security strategy that accepted substantial risk of not meeting our defense needs. A sequestration budget is not one that I could recommend," said Panetta, a former California congressman and one-time head of the House Budget Committee.
At least two of the potential cuts outlined by Panetta would strike at the heart of U.S. defense strategy.
