The case for repealing sequestration.

• Author: Punaro, Arnold L.
• Position: Chairman's Report

* February 2015 was one of the coldest on record in the nation's capital. An icy reception on Capitol Hill also accompanied the administration's fiscal year 2016 budget request. This year will either be a turning point away from sequester levels or the ship of state will crash head on into the sequester iceberg resulting in a titanic disaster.

After the precipitous sequester cuts in 2013, Congress provided a compromise for 2014 and 2015 with a flat, but stable budget level for national security. For 2016 and the years covered by the future years defense plan, the administration has proposed lifting the sequester caps and increasing the defense budget over them by $162 billion. The chairs of both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees have recommended an even higher level.

While the Ryan-Murray compromise provided stability and predictability for two years, during the first three years of sequestration, the Defense Department had to make 70 percent of the sequester level cuts, or $119 billion.

The challenge we face is getting Congress to warm up to the concept of sequester relief in a world that is more dangerous and more unstable than it was in 2011 when the Budget Control Act was passed. Three years later, the world looks very different. Threats are gathering and spreading like wildfire. A resurgent Russia has annexed Crimea and invaded Ukraine. Syria has fallen apart creating a regional conflagration that has undone eight years of work the United States carried out in Iraq. ISIL is brutally killing Syrians, Iraqis and Americans while carving out a caliphate in northern Iraq and Syria. China is attempting to change the status quo in the South China Sea.

But neither world events nor the changeover in control of the Senate has altered the congressional math: Deficit hawks appear to still outnumber defense hawks.

Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen famously said the debt was the greatest threat to our national security. 1 agree with him.

But I would like to add three equally important appendices to his statement. First, sequestration does nothing at all to fix either the short-or long-term drivers of our debt. Second, it actually worsens inefficiencies in the department by introducing wasteful turbulence and uncertainty. Last, it conveys a misleadingly diminished picture of our power in the eyes of friends and foes alike.

As retired Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis testified recently, "No foe in the field can...