Defense drawdown: it's been all talk, now it's time to walk.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: Defense Watch

U.S. military spending peaked in 2010 at $668 billion. It has dropped slightly since then, as the military started withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

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But real austerity has yet to come. So far, the looming budget cuts have been a bogeyman lurking in the dark.

The administration and Congress already have agreed to remove $487 billion from future defense spending beginning in 2013. There is the possibility of further cuts as part of a new deficit-reduction deal expected next year that would avert the congressionally mandated 10 percent across-the-board sequestration. Depending on how the chips end up falling during the negotiations, defense could be squeezed a percentage point or two more.

But the crunch is likely to be relatively benign compared to previous post-war defense drawdowns when budgets plunged by more than 30 percent. The presumption now is that the defense spending curve will stay flat for several years. While that would be welcome news for other federal agencies, no-growth budgets amount to real pain for a Pentagon that, for the most part, still lives in a world where money is no object.

Nobody expects the downsizing to be easy for the Defense Department, where spending has gone unchallenged since 9/11. Former Secretary Robert Gates quipped that trying to cut waste from military agencies was akin to an "Easter egg hunt."

Tough budget decisions about what stays and what goes have been avoided thus far, as the government has operated in wait-and-see mode over the past year, while hoping for the sequestration meat ax to go away. The crisis should come to some resolution next year when the new Congress gets to work. After that, the Pentagon can no longer keep delaying the inevitable. The economic and political realities simply won't allow it, says Gordon Adams, foreign policy professor and a former budget official under the Clinton administration.

"The public is focused on jobs, the economy, the deficit and the debt, and it wants these things fixed," Adams writes in a recent editorial. "So it is high time to start thinking about how to manage a serious drawdown, instead of pretending that it will not happen."

Under any scenario, there will surely be contentious disagreements about what should be cut. The big money in the Pentagon's budget is in operations, payroll and benefits for current workers and retirees. Although the administration already has proposed a 100,000-troop reduction and would like...