The Congress has consented, allowing Chuck Hagel to become secretary of defense, but not without badly bruising him along the way. It must also be said, however, that he bruised himself during the confirmation process. The odds now are slim that he will become a strong and capable secretary. In order to boost the odds of his success, he quickly needs to send signals throughout the organization that he can command respect. Here are some suggestions:

Learn to salute. If the picture accompanying Dov's post is indicative, Hagel's lost the knack since the days when he owed salutes. A crisp salute is a small but totemic thing. It conveys that you understand the culture and the institution. Despite his prior service, there are grave doubts about whether Hagel actually gets it. Because people are watching carefully and taking measure of the new boss, small gestures early on set the tone for a secretary. Les Aspin famously dismissed the ceremonial guard outside his office (which was about respect, not protection), kept people waiting, and his transition team told the military that "there's a new sheriff in town," instead of co-opting Colin Powell's Joint Staff. The first day of Bill Perry's tenure he ran meetings on time that concluded with decisions and applicable guidance that helped people predict the secretary's future judgments, and you could feel the building relax after the erratic and undisciplined tenure of Les Aspin. After Hagel's bungling performance during confirmation, little gestures of competence would send a valuable message to the institution.  

Treat it like a business. DOD is a $600 billion a year operation with a highly-valued brand, a platform on which other businesses rely, and a deadly serious purpose. The administration did Hagel no favors installing him as secretary just before its budget is submitted. After alienating so much of the Congress, he will have to defend a budget he didn't put together. Even someone much more substantive than he would have a difficult time quickly mastering that brief and disciplining the building to keep a common front as significant cuts are imposed. If he cannot do so, the damage will be irreparable. The administration has given the impression it cares more about social issues in the military than it does about the core business of winning the country's wars, and that makes it harder to manage the military on other issues. Putting the nuts and bolts of effective management at the center of his early efforts would send a calming signal and buy him the benefit of the doubt for later.

Repair relations with members of Congress. It is an often overlooked fact that Congress really runs American defense policy. The Senate has abrogated its responsibilities to authorize and appropriate money for the past three years, and 41 members of the Senate did not consent to his appointment; those are strong headwinds. He needs to win them over, otherwise he cannot make a success of his tenure. He needs them to give him money, latitude to reprogram, to enact policies, to side with him over the chiefs when they make end-runs to the Hill. All the time-honored tactics should be employed: breakfast every week with the Big Four appropriators and authorizers, travel with him to their districts and to places that give them campaign fodder, phone calls to share news before it breaks, jobs for members of their staffs, naming anything that needs naming after them. As the secretary with the greatest Senate opposition to his appointment in the history of his position, he needs to do it more, better, and faster than other secretaries have.  

Get the chiefs out of the budget fight. One of the most interesting things about this round of budget squabbles is that the active involvement of the chiefs does not appear to have changed a single vote in Congress. They are impotent to affect attitudes on a major national security issue. The chiefs loudly telling Congress that the cuts will be destructive has been seen not as our protectors sounding the alarm, but as shameless pandering by an over-fed bureaucracy that is exposing itself for the president's benefit. It goes without saying that this is terrible for the military's standing in society. President Obama is importantly to blame for this. During the election he ridiculed Mitt Romney for wanting to increase defense spending, repeatedly insisting that his opponent "would throw money at the chiefs they don't even want!" That created a sense in the broader public that our defense is well-funded. As a result, the chiefs arguments now that the saying the sky is falling seem politicized. If the chiefs credibility is that low, the secretary should disengage them from the fight. He should instead become the lead advocate, making their arguments and shielding them from direct involvement while they engage privately with legislators.

Get out of Washington. Visiting the war zones, visiting bases, visiting troops engaged in training other militaries is part of the secretary's job -- outreach to his constituents and being close to their concerns. The importance of fights in Washington will seem paramount (as they always do), but Hagel is unlikely to be the difference between a policy being adopted or not.  First, because he clearly shares the President's views. Second, because the administration has already made its major policy decisions. And third, because he's hardly the towering presence of a Hillary Clinton on Bob Gates that must be taken into account. That frees him up to get out of Washington and see how the rest of the country and the rest of the world view our choices -- two elements the discussion in Washington too often lacks. Plus, it will remind him of the everyday goodness of the young men and women who choose to put themselves in harm's way for our country. That cannot help but strengthen any secretary.

The United States, protected by two oceans and with a global range of allies and interests, has found for a century that it must go abroad to shape and lead a dangerous world. But President Barack Obama seems, in some respects, to prefer to stay home. Whereas George W. Bush's foreign policy was maximalist, Obama's is minimalist. A foreign policy assessment only halfway through his presidency is no doubt unfair -- he may yet vanquish Iran's nuclear weapons program, put an overdue end to Syria's bloody civil war, stand down Chinese aggression in Asian waters, and oversee a historic wave of trade liberalization. But he has not yet. The Obama Doctrine appears less ambitious. Here are its elements to date:

Nation-building at home, not abroad. President Obama took office so determined to "end the war" in Iraq that he failed to negotiate a follow-on force to sustain stability there. In Afghanistan, after a decade of allied sacrifice and real gains, the administration astonishingly is now flirting with the "zero option" of leaving no U.S. forces there after 2014. Obama prefers to focus on "nation-building at home." But will he be able to if Iraq or Afghanistan backslide into civil war, or if Syria's violent spillover engulfs the Middle East? For all the tactical efficacy of drone strikes, the United States cannot possibly defeat terrorism without at the same time working to build free and prosperous societies in countries, like Pakistan, that nurture it.

Resisting transformationalism. Notwithstanding excellent speeches about bridging the gap between America and the Muslim world, President Obama has treaded more gingerly in his policies. He did not support Iran's Green Revolution and has stood back from the opportunities inherent in the Arab Awakening, allowing post-strongman societies in the Middle East to devise new political arrangements for themselves. Obama has a nuanced understanding of the limits of power and the tragedy of international politics from his oft-cited reading of Reinhold Niebuhr. But the greater tragedy may be declining to use America's great power to more actively support Arab and Iranian liberals desperate to build free societies against fierce opposition from Islamist and ancien regime forces.

 "Leading from behind." In Libya, Syria, and now Mali, we have seen Washington's European allies push for, or carry out themselves, armed interventions to uphold human rights and regional stability. Americans are used to being the hawks in world affairs, and Europeans the doves -- but those roles have reversed under President Obama. This turns the transatlantic bargain on its head: Europeans now seem more concerned with policing out-of-area crises, with America playing a supporting role. But is such passivity really in Washington's interest? Can Europe really lead in matters of war and peace without America at the front? 

Rebalancing American power toward Asia. America's "pivot" has been welcomed in much of Asia and across party lines in Washington. But as Joseph Nye argues, the United States has been pivoting to Asia since the end of the Cold War. It would be more accurate to say that Obama himself pivoted away from seeking a G-2 condominium with China to balancing against it. His administration's support for liberalization in Myanmar has been historic -- but senior U.S. officials say the process is driven by Naypyidaw, not Washington.  It is also unclear if the pivot is more than a rhetorical policy; President Obama has already authorized defense budget cuts of nearly $900 million and supports more.

Unsentimentality towards allies. Even amidst the rebalance, Asian allies like Japan and friends like India have felt neglected by this American president. Similarly, Obama's attention to the transatlantic relationship seems inversely proportional to the affection Europeans feel for him. Despite significant defense transfers, the U.S. administration appears as concerned with preventing Israel from attacking Iran as preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Hard-headedness is a virtue in international relations. America's allies, however, expect it to be directed more at U.S. adversaries than at our friends.

A trade policy high in ambition, if not results. President Obama commendably seeks to double U.S. exports as part of an economic recovery program. His administration has sketched out a transformative vision of an Atlantic marketplace and a Trans-Pacific Partnership. But movement on both has been very slow -- at least as slow as the three years it took for Obama to send Congress free trade agreements, with Korea and other countries, negotiated by his predecessor. The potential for an ambitious trade opening is promising -- if Obama can deliver.

President John F. Kennedy said America would pay any price and bear any burden in support of liberty. President Obama has made clear that under his leadership, America will not do quite so much. But strategic minimalism and a focus on the domestic means problems abroad only grow, inevitably pulling America into crises on less favorable terms. The world looks to America for strategic initiative to solve its thorniest problems. At the moment, demand for this leadership is greater than supply.

This article appeared over the weekend in the special Security Times edition prepared for the Munich Conference on Security Policy and published by Germany's Times Media. The paper as it appeared in print is available at www.times-media.de .  

As Eliot Cohen rightly pointed out in a Washington Post op-ed, there is no correlation between military service and effectiveness as a senior government official. Cohen noted that neither Lincoln nor FDR had significant military experience, yet were great war leaders. One might add that Churchill's military experience in the Boer War had little to do with his later leadership of the military, except perhaps to convince him that he knew more than his generals, which no doubt was a factor in his urging the disastrous Gallipoli operation in World War I and his constant clashes with Alan Brooke, chief of the defense staff, in World War II. And then there is Jimmy Carter, whose naval background did not mitigate his mediocre performance as commander in chief during the immediate post-Vietnam era.

Chuck Hagel's ultimate record as SecDef likewise will have little to do with his service in Vietnam, distinguished though it was. If confirmed, Hagel will face some very tough challenges, even if the dreaded sequester does not come to pass, and it is on the basis of how he addresses those challenges, rather than his previous war record, that his performance as secretary will be judged.

It is all but certain that the cost of avoiding a sequester will be some level of additional defense cuts, beyond those already enshrined in the 2011 Budget Control Act, which called for $487 billion in cuts over a 10-year period. These additional cuts could amount to some $15 billion, perhaps more. Hagel will have to decide where those cuts will be taken.

Hagel has asserted that the Pentagon budget is bloated, but has not explained exactly what he means. The administration has already signaled that it wishes to protect the personnel accounts, even if the sequester were to come into force, despite the fact that those accounts have been steadily eating into available resources for operations, research, and procurement. Will Hagel at least try to push for limits on the growth of the Defense Health Program, which is approaching an annual cost of $60 billion? He has said little on the subject and would have to face a Congress that has resisted any real changes to health benefits for the military and their families. Will Hagel throw his weight behind the new commission on military compensation and retirement, which will address not only the health program, but the entire gamut of military benefits? Again, his position on the commission is unknown.

Many analysts are assuming that Hagel really intends to reduce the size of the DOD acquisition accounts. He has not indicated which accounts might be his target. With its announcement of a "pivot" to Asia and with instability roiling the Middle East, the DOD will already be hard-pressed to meet its commitments in both of those vast regions. Will Hagel nevertheless seek to further shrink the Navy and Air Force, likely to be the most active and visible services in both areas? Would that mean a significantly smaller carrier force and the cancellation of the program for a new manned long-range bomber? Will he attempt to further reduce the size of the Army? As chairman of the board of the Atlantic Council, Hagel has been especially sensitive to relations with Europe, yet the administration has announced plans to reduce land-force presence in Europe by two brigades. Will Hagel seek to reverse that decision? And will Hagel realize Russian President Vladimir Putin's dream by drastically curtailing the U.S. missile defense program at a time when America's allies have finally come to realize its importance?

Finally, would a Secretary Hagel opt for a complete withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan, which most observers feel would at best prompt a renewal of the civil war that only ended with the American response to the 9/11 bombings, and at worst hand it right back to the Taliban?

The foregoing are the known issues that a new secretary of defense will have to face. Then there are the "unknown unknowns" that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld frequently cited. He knew of what he spoke: On Sept. 10, 2001, Rumsfeld told his Pentagon staff that the biggest challenge to the Defense Department was its own cumbersome management system. A day later he, and all of America, were confronted by a far greater challenge that has yet to be overcome.

The Obama administration has a civil-military problem and, I have reason to believe, they know it. Significant portions of the military believe the administration abandoned them on Iraq, sent them unsupported into battle in Afghanistan hampered by a politically driven timeline, and is jeopardizing national security with unsustainably deep cuts in military spending.

If Obama wins a second term, he and his national security team will have a lot of remedial work to do to repair relations with the military.

I think Vice President Biden made that job even more difficult with his remarkable comments in each of those areas in the VP debate.

On Iraq, Biden criticized Romney-Ryan for recommending that we have a 30,000 stay-behind force in Iraq. When Ryan pointed out that the Obama administration had actually been trying to negotiate a stay-behind force, Biden just smiled mockingly at him, as if Ryan were talking nonsense.

But Ryan was not talking nonsense. The official position of the Obama administration until late in 2011 was that they were seeking a Status of Forces Agreement (SoFA) to permit a stay-behind force in Iraq. The exact size was in doubt, but the 30,000 figure was what the military wanted and the White House supported the concept, if not the exact number. The Obama administration wanted this for the very same reason the Bush administration wanted it: It was the best way to solidify the gains of the Iraq surge and to build a stable partnership with Iraq.

Biden knows all of this because he was leading the effort to negotiate the SOFA. Was Biden's mocking smile saying something else, perhaps that Obama was never seriously committed to negotiating a successful SOFA? Was Obama's decision to delegate this task to Biden a sign of how committed Obama was to it? Or how uncommitted he was? Was Biden's guarantee that he would get the SOFA just idle bragging from someone assigned a trivial task?

The U.S. military leadership believed they accomplished something significant in the Iraq surge, and they believed that the Obama administration wanted to get them a SOFA that would help secure those accomplishments. Did Biden tell them otherwise in the debate last night? Or did Biden, as Ryan pointedly asked, simply fail at his SOFA assignment, in which case the mocking laughter is beyond inappropriate?

On Afghanistan, Biden's comments were even more troubling. Let's set aside the extraordinary "mission accomplished" boast, a remarkable thing to say when American men and women continue to risk their lives under very dire circumstances in theater. Biden got away with it, and neither Ryan nor the hapless Martha Raddatz called him out on it.

Where things really got dicey was when, in response to the charge that the Afghan surge withdrawal timeline was driven by political considerations, Biden tried to hide behind the military. Raddatz pressed him on the complaints she is hearing -- we all are hearing -- but Biden dismissed it as nonsense. He pretended that the withdrawal timeline was proposed by the Joint Chiefs rather than imposed by the White House.

That is not true. The Joint Chiefs and the Afghan combatant commander did go along with the White House order, but they proposed a slower, conditions-based timeline and they certainly did not want it announced at the outset.

This is a very dangerous game to play. Because of the strong support for the principle of civilian control among our armed forces, civilians can and do make the military salute and obey orders the military think are inadvisable. Canny commanders-in-chief try to minimize those instances, working with the military to cajole and bargain them into supporting positions that they initially opposed (this is exactly what Bush did with the Iraq surge). But when the White House bigfoots a decision, as the Obama White House did multiple times on Afghanistan, it is the president who must shoulder the political load for the decision.

Biden knows, or should know, that from the military's perspective President Obama imposed an under-resourced Afghan surge, undercut it by announcing the timeline, and interrupted the last fighting season by accelerating the withdrawal. That was his prerogative as commander-in-chief. But if that policy is criticized, as Ryan did in the debate, the Obama White House must be honest about how it came about. Biden cannot pretend that this was the military's plan all along.

Biden tried the same gambit on the defense cuts: "That was the decision of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recommended to us and agreed to by the president. That is a fact....They made the recommendation first."

Yet, as he surely knows, the White House came up with a budget cut number and then asked the defense department to come up with a strategy that fit under that number. The defense department did not come up with the budget cuts first, they came up with the strategy that they thought, barely, could be viable under those cuts. (Defense had come up with defense cuts on their own earlier, in the hopes that those cuts could be reassigned to more pressing defense priorities, but the Obama White House simply pocketed those cuts and then directed more.)

It gets worse. When Biden and Obama say "defense spending the military didn't ask for' that is incorrect since the military did ask for all that spending -- in the previous year's budget. Actually, Obama asked for it, since it was his budget request. Yes, the following year Obama changed his mind and he ordered the military to adjust to the lower cuts.

I am not sure there are enough Pinocchios in Tuscany to describe how misleading it is to order the military to accept cuts and then pretend that they requested those cuts.

And, dissembling aside, when you play political hardball with the military in that fashion it almost always leads to problems down the line. Serious Obama national security professionals understand this, but they don't seem to have any influence on what the candidates are saying.

Again, it is fully proper as a matter of civil-military relations for the president to impose cuts on Defense, and he can do it in whatever sequence he chooses. But he should not impose the number, receive the military salute, and then turn around and tell the American people that this was all the military's idea.

An administration enjoying strong and healthy relations with the military can probably get away with self-inflicted wounds of the sort that Biden's remarks produced. I am not sure this administration can afford it.

Every year between Memorial Day and the 4th of July there is a flurry of interest in reviving the draft.  I expect some of my FP colleagues will post seasonal items on the subject -- Josh Rogin already has.

This is the hardy perennial of American civil-military debates.  And since I have the most parochial of interests in civil-military debates, who am I to complain about civil-military debates that will never end?

So I won't complain about the re-occurrence, but I do have a complaint about what is missing in the debate.  Usually, the draft is presented as a way to close the gap between the military and American society.  The gap arises because we ask a few to protect the many, and this creates the potential that each side will become alienated from the other, especially if the few becomes drawn ever more narrowly from a self-selected segment of American society. Sometimes, the draft is also presented as a way to make it more difficult to use the military in a cavalier fashion -- not merely to bind the military to American society, but to bind the military, period, or at least bind the hands of political leaders who have the authority to order the military into battle.

However, I have yet to read a compelling case for reviving the draft that is premised on making the military more effective -- more capable of defending American national interest, which is, after all, its primary purpose.  The reason those arguments are not made in a compelling fashion is because the most likely result of a draft is a less capable military.  

Today, the United States is protected by the best trained, best equipped, most capable fighting force in history.  That boast has been made for the past two decades and it has been true every year.  Indeed, the U.S. military of today is vastly more capable than the draft-era military.

Moreover, it is especially more capable at fighting the way American society has increasingly asked to fight, namely with exceeding care simultaneously to reduce our own casualties and civilian casualties on the battlefield. That is emphatically not how the draft-era militaries fought because they had neither the technology nor the training to do so.

I suspect many of the proponents of the draft would be content with the less capable U.S. military that would result because they believe that the higher goal is to limit the use of the American military.  They believe American leaders have been too quick to intervene militarily, so this diminished capacity might not be a bug but a feature of the draft-based force.  And given the controversial interventions of the past two decades, they have a point. But there have also been numerous controversial non-interventions (Rwanda, Congo, Darfur, etc.), which those proponents never seem to discuss much.  More importantly, there is little evidence that U.S. political leaders have been cavalier about committing U.S. troops to battle.  On the contrary, they have agonized about the decision, even in the controversial cases.

There is abundant evidence, however, that when committed, U.S. troops have been extraordinarily capable and proficient.  Would that be lost if we reverted to a draft?

In concluding his elegant book On China, Henry Kissinger describes an ongoing debate within Chinese leadership circles. Some of its ruling class believes China should maintain its "peaceful development" strategy in accordance with a rules-based international order, while others demand that China now adopt a more aggressive posture that directly challenges American primacy. I've just returned from a month in China and experienced some of this debate firsthand. Visits to several cities, and meetings and conversations with Chinese officials, scholars, foreign business leaders, American officials and, yes, taxi drivers produce an amalgam of impressions.

The best way to make sense of the current state of affairs in China is to think of not one but several "Chinas" -- each is real, but none by itself is the full reality. The following are six of the "Chinas" that exist today; the question is which of these will command the future.

Rising Power: Chinese leaders are obsessed with their nation's rise, and see it reclaiming its historic position as a dominant world power. Many Chinese strategists also believe the U.S. is in decline. But their opinion splits on what this means. Those who see the U.S. primarily as an adversary (see below) welcome America's declension, while those who see the U.S. more as a partner in China's rise worry about the consequences of a diminished U.S. Several Chinese thinkers expressed their frustration with what they see as erratic American policy under the Obama administration, which has veered from the "G-2" embrace of 2009 to the now perceived hostility of the "pivot." Some Chinese interlocutors also pointed out the same fact that troubles many Americans: A White House pursuing massive defense cuts cannot adequately resource a bolstered posture in Asia.

Security Threat: The debate within the U.S. over whether or not China poses a threat often misses the Chinese perspective: many (though certainly not all) Chinese strategists see America as their principle adversary. The People's Liberation Army is operationalizing this attitude in its development of weapons platforms designed to counter the U.S. As I pointed out in a discussion with some Chinese scholars and officials, the standard American talking point demanding more "transparency" from China about its military modernization and expansion may be diplomatically requisite, but it elides the real issue. The U.S. does not merely want "transparency" from China; we want China to stop developing weapons directly targeted against American force projection capabilities -- if it doesn't intend to become our adversary.

Economic Dynamo: While China's growth is slowing and some of its numbers may be contrived, its economic strength is real and its long-term trajectory still looks promising. Virtually all Chinese speak with tremendous pride about their nation's economic boom, which they have experienced firsthand in materially-improved lives. Many Chinese believe that their nation weathered the global economic crisis relatively unscathed, which in their minds vindicates their model and equips them to meet future challenges such as the transition from export reliance to domestic consumption. Massive infrastructure projects such as the many new airports and high speed rail may excessively dazzle some Western visitors, but this should not diminish the genuine accomplishment they represent. Nor have corruption, bureaucracy and stacked decks dissuaded many international investors from still hungering to grow their stakes in the China market.

Fragile Kleptocracy: My own Tom Friedman-esque moment of analysis-via-taxi-drivers came one evening when all of the Beijing taxi drivers in the central part of the city had turned off their meters and were charging rates five times the metered rate for a ride back to our hotel. After some customary evasions, one of them admitted that this was their version of a work slowdown. Strikes are illegal, but the frustrations of Beijing taxi drivers, whose rates haven't been increased in ten years amidst surging expenses despite many pleas to the government, boiled over into illicit protest. Such resentments are multiplied across the country, crossing industries and rural and urban lines, resulting in tens of thousands of protests annually. Then there is the Bo Xilai case, which continues to reverberate, especially as Bo's fate is negotiated amidst maneuverings for the upcoming Party Congress and leadership transition. The Bo case is only exceptional in that it became public. Otherwise it is all too familiar in China, where corruption is pervasive, governance is brittle and a senior Party post commonly also includes control of a favored industry or company.

Reforming Autocracy: Yes, China remains a repressive autocracy, but nevertheless ongoing reforms and liberalizations are taking place, many enabled by communications technology that the government cannot entirely suppress. A major news story during my visit was the heinous forced abortion on a Chinese woman seven months' pregnant in Shaanxi province. Social networks in China erupted with popular outrage, as heartbreaking photos of the mother next to her dead baby circulated widely, and an embarrassed Chinese government responded by suspending the local officials responsible. This is a woefully deficient punishment, and the manifestly unjust one-child policy remains in force, despite China's looming demographic nightmare. But even a few years ago this crime would have never been disclosed at all, let alone prompted public protest and an official response.

Insecure Bully: Some revealing yet head-scratching moments came when Chinese interlocutors expressed their consternation at the U.S. Embassy Beijing's Twitter feed reporting on air quality in Beijing, while in the next breath they defended China's provocations such as its anti-satellite missile test, bellicose territorial claims on the South China Sea and support for North Korea. These are not the actions of a confident, responsible stakeholder, but of an insecure bully, obsessing over its international image while engaging in obnoxious behavior that does much more damage to its image than any American report on human rights or environmental quality. This insecurity also prevents China from coming to terms with its own history. While the Cultural Revolution is widely lamented, the Tiananmen Square massacre (whose 23^rd anniversary passed with censorship even of the Shanghai Stock Exchange) cannot be mentioned, and Mao remains valorized. China's insecurities also help explain its foreign policies to shield the Syrian regime and Iranian nuclear program, and prop up the Kim dictatorship in North Korea -- all of these are short-sighted decisions, but short-term thinking is a hallmark of an insecure government obsessed with maintaining its hold on power.

Some of the "Chinas" above are positive, others are negative. Yet in understanding China all of these variations must be taken into account.The U.S. has a major stake in encouraging political reform and economic growth while discouraging the internal repression and truculent behavior towards its neighbors. Mistakes in China policy come from privileging one scenario over all the others -- for example the "China Fantasists" who believe the growing economy will inevitably lead to a democratic, peaceful China, or the offensive realists who focus on the Chinese military threat while ignoring the economic benefits the U.S. receives in the relationship, let alone China's internal fragilities.

This is also why China policy is such a challenge. Taken together, the multiple realities of China today defy any simple historical analogies about the management of rising powers, and demand an unprecedented wholeness of vision from the United States.

More than any other economic danger looming on America's immediate horizon, including a possible break-up of the eurozone, sequestration poses the greatest single threat to American recovery in the near term. This arcane process came into force when the congressionally-mandated "super-committee, "officially known as  the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction, failed in its mission. As a result, the sequester calls for reductions in government spending totaling $1.2 trillion over the next nine years, of which $984 billion, or $109 billion annually, will be realized from across-the-board budget reductions.

Although defense accounts for only 14 percent of the budget deficit, when entitlements are taken into account, the annual $109 billion dollar cut will be evenly divided between defense and non-defense reductions, with some small reductions in entitlements contributing to the non-defense side of the ledger. Put another way, once the sequester comes into effect, defense-related appropriations will have to be reduced by $55 billion annually. And these reductions will be of the sledgehammer variety: Every "program, project and activity" will be reduced by the same percentage, regardless of its relative importance to the overall enhancement of national security.

It gets worse. The sequester does not begin to bite until January 2, 2013 -- that is, until the beginning of the second quarter of the upcoming fiscal year. That means that the entire $55 billion must be found from programs that had not yet been obligated during the first quarter of the fiscal year. To the extent that such commitments will have been made, the amount of funding susceptible to reductions will itself be reduced, and the percentage of reductions will accordingly increase. Finally, because President Obama is expected to exempt the military personnel accounts, which total some $141 billion, and Congress is expected to exempt the contingency-related accounts (which are the major source of funding for the war in Afghanistan), there will remain some $375 billion, from which $55 billion will have to be found, resulting in a 15 percent reduction in all other defense programs. 

The impact of that reduction will be highly disruptive to both the current and longer term defense program. It will result in massive reductions in weapons systems, though not in personnel. It will render the pivot to Asia meaningless; any plans for increasing our military muscle in that region will be completely undermined by the reduction in shipbuilding, aircraft, missile, drones, and a host of other acquisition programs. Our presence in the rest of the world will at best fare no better, and, in light of the so-called pivot, will probably suffer even more.

All the foregoing has long been well-known to Washington's defense cognoscenti and especially its bean counters. What is less well-known, and at least equally alarming, is the impact of the sequester on the economy as a whole. As the recently released study by the Bipartisan Policy Center points out (full disclosure: I am a member of the Center's Task Force on Defense Budget and Strategy), the sequester will result in the loss of about a million jobs in 2013 and 2014 and America's GDP will decline by half a percent. Moreover, of these million lost jobs, it can safely be asserted that at least half will come from the non-defense sector. In other words, the sequester is not just a defense problem that should agitate only hawks. It is a national problem, and it demands immediate relief. 

Despite the urgency of the sequester's challenge, the administration continues to sit on its hands. No draft legislation has emerged from the White House that would at least postpone the sequester for a reasonable period to enable Congress to try its hand at another effort to reduce the deficit. The administration's allies on the hill, particularly in the Senate, have been equally nonchalant about the coming programmatic and economic disaster.

Such nonchalance carries with it a very high risk, however, and not only for the economy. In addition to its impact on the government's budget, the sequester will also trigger the WARN Act, which requires employers to give a minimum of sixty days notice to private and public sector employees whose jobs are being targeted for possible termination. Those politicians seeking re-election to national office should take note that Nov. 2, 60 days before Jan. 2, when the sequester comes into force, is just four days before election day. They may find it very uncomfortable having to explain to potentially hundreds of thousands of people who have been given WARN Act pink slips why they deserve to be returned to office after they did nothing about the sequester. America's economic house is burning; the Neros of Washington had better act soon, or they may find that their political fate will echo that of their ancient Roman namesake.

The Nov. 23 deadline for a "Supercommittee" budget agreement is fast approaching, and no such agreement is as yet in sight. The Pentagon appears to be panicking over the prospect of sequestration, and with it a reduction of some $600 billion in defense-related spending over the next decade. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's warnings have become ever more dire. He has said that sequestration will "invite aggression from U.S. adversaries", that it will result in a "hollow force" of "ships without sailors" and "brigades without bullets."

The Secretary should know better. Not because sequestration, if implemented, would not be a disaster for DoD, but because the absence of an agreement, which would trigger a sequester, does not mean that sequestration will ever come to pass. It is important to note that the sequester would only come into force for the Fiscal Year 2013 budget; in other words, nearly a year must still pass before any cuts are mandated. And the Congress thus has nearly a year to legislate the sequester into the dustbin of history. 

It has happened exactly that way before, as Mr. Panetta knows only too well. He was a veteran of the House Budget Committee in 1988 when the Congress reached a budget deficit agreement that wiped out a $20 billion sequestration that was supposed to have been "automatically" triggered by the 1985 Balanced Budget Emergency Deficit Control Act, popularly known as Gramm-Rudman-Hollings. And he was chairman of the House Budget Committee in 1990, when he played a major role in the enactment of Congressional legislation that again circumvented the 1985 Act by lowering sequestration levels from the "automatic" $16 billion that the Act would have mandated to just over $4.5 billion in budget reductions. Again in 1991, with Mr. Panetta still serving as House Budget Committee chairman, a smaller sequester of some $190 million was rescinded in subsequent legislation that year when the purported savings were found to be the result of a miscalculation.

It is arguable that the long term health of America's defense posture would be better served if the Supercommittee fails to produce an agreement than if it does. It will be much harder for the Congress to rescind a budget deal to which all sides agreed, than to rescind a sequester that was the product of an absence of agreement. Even under the best of circumstances, it is unlikely that Defense could avoid cuts of $200-300 billion in a deal that totals $1.2 trillion; and those cuts will be difficult, if not impossible to restore. On the other hand, the Congress can be expected to rescind sequestration precisely because of the warnings that the Pentagon's top leaders have issued. And once the Congress returns to square one, the prospects for protecting the Defense budget will radically improve.

Since I have often argued in these electronic pages for reducing defense spending, I feel the need to respond to Tom Mahnken's post, and hopefully draw out the arguments for and against maintaining or increasing our current DOD accounts.

I agree with Tom that our current level of defense spending is not an undue burden on the American economy. Since the end of World War II, spending levels have been far in excess of our current roughly 4 percent of GDP without demonstrable negative economic effects.

But three other factors persuade me that reductions to defense spending should be undertaken. First, we have a national security vulnerability of epic proportions in our federal debt. Defense is not the primary cause of that debt; obviously, our medical and retirement programs need to be reduced and brought into sustainable proportions. But defense is a significant contributor to the debt. Military strength is not the sole basis of American power -- our economy, our values, our vibrancy demand we put ourselves on sound financial footing, which requires us to address the problem of American debt addiction. I have a difficult time seeing how either the math or the politics work to bring federal spending into line with receipts if conservatives rule defense out of bounds.

Second, our near-term margin of error is actually enormously wide in defense compared to any prospective challenger. The world is much more conducive to American interests than it was when Defense spending as a proportion of GDP was much higher: we are militarily dominant, the threats to us are fewer and less apocalyptic, our allies are more capable to handle their own problems, our enemies less so, and our values on the ascendancy. Coming off two intellectually and operationally demanding wars, the American military is weary but amazingly proficient and adaptive. 

Moreover, our military services are better than at any time in history. They have conducted a rolling modernization, replacing equipment with much better equipment as it was exhausted in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have battle tested forces that can successfully span the spectrum from high-intensity warfare to counterinsurgency, excelling at individuals taking initiative. While others may learn from studying our operations, there's no substitute for the doing we have been doing.

Third, the American military is brilliant at effectiveness; efficiency, not so much. As Admiral Mullen confessed during the last budget cycle, money has been plentiful in DOD for so long we've forgotten how to budget and economize. We tend to overwhelm problems with resources. That's not a bad strategy, but it's a profligate strategy, and we ought to hold ourselves to a higher standard. Our strongest suit is not spending but innovation, and because of the demands of the wars, we have a military primed for tackling the problems with more innovative approaches.

Spending does not guarantee capability; in many cases, it impedes finding better solutions and creates complacency. We have more than doubled the baseline budget in the past ten years, even before adding in the operational costs of the wars. Is the world twice as dangerous as it was in 2001? I doubt it. Besides, inputs are not the right measure of outputs. I believe it's genuinely wrong to equate spending with commitment to defense. Our safety lies in our ability to find better solutions, not our ability to spend more than our adversaries.

I'd be very interested in Tom and other Shadow colleagues' thinking on the three issues of whether they consider debt a greater threat, our margin of error militarily wide, and whether they see the need for greater efficiency in our approach to defense challenges.