Hawks Claim Defense Cuts Could Jeopardize ISIS Campaign. They Won’t.

As the specter of a
decreased rate of increased defense spending looms over the
Pentagon, hawks of all feathers are flocking together to battle
sequestration,
reports The Hill. Because Assad
ISIS:

A growing number of congressional Republicans say the spending
cuts, set to return next year, will threaten the fight against
the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

 But budget experts are calling B.S. Literally.

“The technical term for that is bullshit,” said Stan Collender,
executive vice president at Qorvis MSLGROUP. “They’re just using it
as an excuse to raise the defense cap,” Collender said. “The truth
is that long before ISIS, the defense community was lobbying to get
rid of sequestration so they’re just taking advantage of what was
presented to them, to spin the situation.”

“You never
let a serious crisis go to waste” is clearly a maxim common to
both Obama administration officials and defense apparatchiks. But
the kicker is that
Operation Inherent Resolve isn’t even tied to the overall
defense budget affected by any sequestration, as Todd Harrison,
senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary
Assessments, pointed out:

“That’s kind of a bogus argument because war-related funding
like operations against ISIS comes from emergency supplemental
funding not subject to the budget caps,” he said of those saying
the ISIS fight will be hampered by sequester cuts.

The multibillion dollar
slush fund in question is the
Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account, a pot o’ gold
liberally used by both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations
for the Iraq and Afghanistan imbroglios (and more recently, for the

ill-advised military campaign against Ebola).

In a world of
perpetual crisis, however, inconvenient truths can
be as
readily wished away
as
Iraq war justifications. A GOP aide told The
Hill that defense cuts will still adversely affect
whatever it is we’re doing in Syria and Iraq because the OCO
doesn’t cover military training and preparedness. Hence, the
argument goes, a sequestration can obliquely screw up our campaign
against ISIS.

It’s hard to take seriously hawks grumbling about cuts that
won’t even affect the funds being used for their latest imprudent
bombing campaign. But then again, it’s hard to take seriously
any apocalyptic warnings from a defense establishment that
already spends more than
the next eight countries combined, particularly when the
military weathered the last “draconian” cuts
just fine.