--- title: Should the Pentagon be Afraid of Budget Cuts? | TIME description: What will happen to the U.S. defense budget if the debt supercommittee fails? canonical: https://time.com/video/pgIo19R2/ og:title: Should the Pentagon be Afraid of Budget Cuts? og:description: What will happen to the U.S. defense budget if the debt supercommittee fails? og:url: https://time.com/video/pgIo19R2/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/pgIo19R2/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Should the Pentagon be Afraid of Budget Cuts? twitter:description: What will happen to the U.S. defense budget if the debt supercommittee fails? twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/pgIo19R2/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Should the Pentagon be Afraid of Budget Cuts? > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Should the Pentagon be Afraid of Budget Cuts? [Watch (HLS stream): Should the Pentagon be Afraid of Budget Cuts?](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/pgIo19R2.m3u8) (3:14)  _Published 2011-10-03. What will happen to the U.S. defense budget if the debt supercommittee fails?_ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:17 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Pentagon Says Record Defense Budget Is Necessary To Compete With China](/video/ujPBer7t/) ### Pentagon Says Record Defense Budget Is Necessary To Compete With China [President Trump Tells Puerto Rico Hurricane Destruction Killed The U.S. Budget](/video/oF8uP8zr/) ### President Trump Tells Puerto Rico Hurricane Destruction Killed The U.S. Budget [Could Budget Cuts Cripple the Department of Defense?](/video/9ueoVGlr/) ### Could Budget Cuts Cripple the Department of Defense? --- ## Transcript This is Command Post, a series of discussions about military matters from Time and The Center for a New American Security. [ MUSIC ] Ty, why is everybody talking all about the super committee, and why are folks in the Pentagon so petrified about it? Well, what the super committee's been charged with is finding an additional 1. 2 to 1. 5 trillion in deficit reduction. Over the next nine years, and I guess the reason everyone in the Pentagon is worried is if the supercommittee fails, if they don't reach some sort of a compromise or achieve that level of deficit reduction, then the trigger provision of the bill kicks in. The trigger provision would cut 1. 2 trillion out of the federal budget over the next nine years. It'd be split evenly between non- defense discretionary and defense discretionary. So, taking out interest savings and everything It would end up taking another 470 billion or so out of the base defense budget. So, it's a lot of money we're talking about. So in the sense of discretionary spending, is the Pentagon, under the trigger provision, paying it's fair share, or is it being asked to do more than it's fair share? Well, the Pentagon budget is about half, a little over half, right now of the discretionary budget. So if your just focusing on cutting the discretionary part of the budget, it's doing it's fair share. But of course the discretionary budget is less than half of total federal spending. So in that sense DOD would be taking more than its fair share relative to the rest of the Federal government. And, and most of that is entitlement. right, Social Security actually the budget for Social Security is about the same amount as DOD right now. And then, you know, Medicare or Medicaid, other big programs on the mandatory side of the budget. I think it's also important to note that the number that you gave, about 470 billion over those nine years, is on top of the 350 to 450 billion, depending on exactly whose baseline number you're using, cut the D. O. D. is already taking, so the total numbers add up to a really very serious cut indeed. I mean, and that's another good point that you raise. Everyone keeps throwing around a lot of different numbers. It's all relative to what baseline you're using. Correct me if I'm wrong. But, don't you argue or make the point that even if the triggers are implemented. The Pentagon will be forced to go back to what it spent in 2007. We're not talking about going back to 1968 or 1958, we're talking about a level of military spending we had less than five year ago. True or false? That's true. So what happens under the trigger provision, if it kicks in as it's currently written in the law, it would drop the base defense budget to about 472 billion, and that compares to about what the base defense budget was in the year 2007. The problem for the Pentagon is they were planning on continued growth. They were planning on 571 billion in the base budget for a FY13. So they view it as a 99 billion dollar reduction. And the way the budget has grown since 2007, a lot of the things that have grown aren't easily reversible. So bottom line is in terms of cuts, were not talking about real cuts, were talking about reductions. In the future rate of growth. But if the triggers come into play, we're talking real cuts. [ MUSIC ] ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Should the Pentagon be Afraid of Budget Cuts?","description":"What will happen to the U.S. defense budget if the debt supercommittee fails?","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/pgIo19R2/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2011-10-03T20:53:43.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/pgIo19R2.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/pgIo19R2/","duration":"PT3M14S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/pgIo19R2/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```