While the nation's capital burns with gossip about David Petraeus and his love life, the fiscal cliff is not far away. I don't often wade into the waters of broader federal budgeting, but people are beginning to explore the endgame of this Beckettian drama and a few wonder about its implications for the defense budget. Defense is just a residual issue here; the big top is focused on revenues and entitlements.

Paul Krugman says the whole cliff fracas is a diversion, especially at the leading edge of a recovery; keep spending until the economy is healthy.

Unfortunately, the political system and the march of law and time are inexorable. Those pesky Bush tax cuts expire at the end of the year, so something must be done, either to extend them or to split them in two, the way Obama proposes: families with over $250,000 of income get a higher rate -- up from 35 percent to 39.6 percent -- while everybody else keeps the lower rates in the original legislation.

A few other items are lying around, needing urgent repair before damage is done. The Alternate Minimum Tax is not indexed for inflation, so more middle-income families (including yours truly) will get whacked next April, unless the AMT is at least "band-aided" for the 2012 tax year. America's doctors are surely going to lobby against letting their Medicare reimbursements fall, which happens at the end of December. It seems like very few Americans are going to lobby to perpetuate the 2 percent reduction in the payroll tax for Social Security, so maybe that is gone; the same may be true for the extension of unemployment benefits, now that the economy is headed to recovery.

The long poles in the circus tent are sequestration, the likelihood that we will again bump up against the debt ceiling toward the end of 2012 (with Treasury vamping to postpone the problem into February), and the threat of a government shutdown on April 1, in the absence of final appropriations.

The debate is all about these issues, especially whether the White House and the Republicans in the House are prepared to put the biggies on the table: revenues and entitlements. Defense is the side-show, even though the "defenders of defense" have danced up and down for more than a year, trying to make it the main event.

It seems to me likely that one of two scenarios plays out over the next six weeks (or 14 legislative days, if you count that way). Either way, it will be sausage, not a Grand Bargain.

Option One: Dive off the cliff. The president lets the tax cuts expire and sequester happen. The Office of Management and Budget defers the impact of the sequester by apportioning funds to agencies at the level appropriated in the current continuing resolution (which goes until March 27, 2013), so spending does not actually take a whack right away.

The new Congress comes in and starts with the functional equivalent of a clean slate -- tax rates have gone up, the sequester has happened (but the impact is deferred). They start a new round of talks with the president, leading to an agreement that kicks the can down the road. The agreement is a framework on the issues that matter: revenues and entitlements. The framework sets targets for both, raising revenues and lowering entitlement spending projections. But there are no details: these are left to the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee to fill in by a given deadline. Over to you, David Camp and Max Baucus.

In this scenario, discretionary spending is a residual issue. Perhaps the agreement lowers the "caps" set out in the Budget Control Act of August 2011 to make the numbers work. Defense dollars fall below the numbers projected in the current caps. David Leonhardt thinks so; so do I.

Advantages of Option One: it sets new baselines for revenues and for discretionary spending. Anything the next Congress does to change those baselines looks good, because Congress can claim that it lowered taxes (from the new baseline) and that it raised spending (from the baseline).

Disadvantage: The markets may not be happy, sending the stock market into a tailspin nobody wants.

Option Two: this same deal is reached before the end of the December. Disadvantage: the new Congress is cut out and there are no new baselines for revenues and discretionary spending.

Advantage: the markets like the agreement and the recovery appears to continue. It has the same effect on discretionary spending: it is a residual. To get the overall number, defense still goes down below the current caps, possibly even in FY 2013.

Either way, from the view of someone in the defense business, the consequence of defense being a side-show, with reductions needed to get the whole package to line up with the existing or new spending targets, is that defense budgets continue to go down.

Just what I always thought.

A recent small piece in Stars and Stripes about the Navy Seabees working in Cambodia reminds me, yet again, of the mindless and increasingly risky way the United States is engaging overseas. The Seabees, it seems, have been building schools and health clinics and digging wells in Cambodia, all for the greater good and benefit of the Cambodian people.

Last time I looked, Cambodia was not a combat zone. There is not a question here of only being able to do good works with our soldiers because the enemy abounds and civilians are not safe. That was the reason the Seabees were created -- to provide engineering and construction where only soldiers were safe. They were not created as a foreign assistance force.

We have a foreign assistance force; it is called the U.S. Agency for International Development, which operates with the assistance of the State Department. But over the past ten years or so, we have larded up our military with missions that USAID and State should be doing -- development, governance support, social support, training for ministries, public diplomacy.

Iraq and Afghanistan and those questionable Provincial Reconstruction Teams put military foreign aid on steroids. The assumption that we have to bolster security around the world using Special Operations forces, the Seabees, and other non-combat military capabilities has expanded this type of engagement, with health clinics, schools, and wells (is that the recipe in the Seabee handbook?) springing up in the Horn of Africa and across the Sahel region. And now in Cambodia.

It all sounds very nice and gung-ho American. But it is both the wrong approach to assistance and dangerous to our security.

It is the wrong approach to assistance because, for all the vaunted Seabee capability, they are not a development force; they are not "best practiced" in development. They do not, and cannot put such construction into the context of Cambodia's development and governance needs; they can just sweep in and "do good." But that may have little to do with what the Cambodians actually need; Seabees have no competence in that area. As too many projects in Iraq and Afghanistan show, the short-term effort to "win hearts and minds" backfires when the schools lack teachers and material; the clinics lack doctors and medicines. In other words, the Seabees have no way to ensure the advisability or sustainability of such projects.

And it is dangerous. For decades, Americans have told the militaries of the world to stand down their social and economic programs, their corporate ownership, their civilian work, in their own countries. Militaries should do what militaries should do, not what governments and civil society should do.

By "invading" with militarized "soft power," we are contradicting this message. "See," we are saying, "the military can do all this great stuff." What lesson should the host country draw? First, that soldiers are more desirable for these tasks than civilians, which has the consequence of empowering military forces in countries that actually need stronger civilian government. And second, that the United States engages abroad, yes, but when it engages, it commonly wears a uniform. What does that tell the rest of the world about how, when, and why the United States engages abroad?

For all the smiling children and grateful mothers, expanding U.S. military missions in this way sets the United States on a very dangerous course, putting our long-term security and relationships at risk. Time to skill up and strengthen our civilian toolkit and send our military back to its core tasks and competence.

Well, the Washington Post has misspoken again on defense.

Its editorial today brushes fact aside in its rush to endorse higher spending for defense by capturing 4 percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) over the next 10 years. But the absence of clarity in the Romney tax platform, which makes the math for getting $2 trillion more for defense over the next 10 years difficult, is not the only part of the Romney defense plan that does not add up.

Have no doubt that the Romney commitment to 4 percent means an actual $2 trillion more. That's math, not speculation, though the Romney advisors tried to wriggle out of it earlier this week by saying it would be a slope to 4 percent of GDP. That's $2 trillion on top of the $5.7 trillion already projected for the defense budget by Secretary Leon Panetta, when he sent his budget to Congress in February. That's an increase of 35 percent.

And, pace the Post, that's a big number. Let's remember that the "supercommittee" couldn't agree to $1.2 trillion in budget savings. The Romney commitment would make that challenge pale by comparison. And meanwhile, the Post's editorial board tries to argue that 6 percent of U.S. GDP -- the average level of defense spending during the Cold War -- is not significant. Actually, they're right.

But calculating the share that defense eats of our economy is one of the most meaningless and deceptive arguments ever employed in talking about defense. It only tells you what it tells you -- the share of GDP. It says absolutely nothing about what we actually spend on defense, what we buy with the money, what capabilities we currently have, or what we might require. It's a nonsense number. And it is and always has been a nonsense number to foist on our allies. The real issues are capabilities and strategy, not the share of GDP.

The Post editorial simply runs away from a discussion of capabilities linked to strategy. It mindlessly endorses adding back the 100,000 ground troops currently leaving the force, despite the fact that they were only added to ease rotations in two wars, of which one is now over and the other ending soon. Ground forces always shrink after wars, and they should. The remaining U.S. ground force is larger than any nation's but China -- and China is frankly the last country we are going to invade with ground forces. (Remember the last ground war in Asia?)

Unless the Post's editors are endorsing a U.S. ground invasion in the Middle East (for which there is zero public support), there is precious little threat out there today that demands a large ground force, especially in the Pacific theater to which our attention is swinging. And even in the Middle East, the limits on what any U.S. ground force can accomplish have already been amply demonstrated.

The Post also mindlessly endorses the goal of buying 15 ships a year, despite the reality that we have not bought that many since 1986, not even during the George W. Bush years, not to mention that with the current prices of ships, such a goal is entirely unaffordable. Oh, but we need a 346-ship navy, the Post agrees, endorsing without analysis, the proposal of the Independent Panel on the Quadrennial Defense Review. The need for such a navy is highly debatable. The one we have today dominates far and away the navies of any other power, or any potential adversaries put together, including in the Pacific theater.

And though the Post asserts that this larger ground and naval force better fits current strategic needs than the Panetta projections, it provides no link between that force and any new strategic needs.

The reality is that, today, the United States has today the most dominant military capability on the globe. It flies, floats, and deploys everywhere and has global logistics, infrastructure, intelligence, communications, and transportation. The currently projected defense budgets, even a reduction from those budgets, would do very little to change that global dominance, as no other power, including China, even tries to maintain such a global capability.

There are far more pressing needs, in the civilian foreign policy world and, especially here at home, that could do vastly more to ensure our security than throwing another $2 trillion at the Department of Defense, on top of what is already the highest level of defense spending, in constant dollars, we have had since the end of World War II.

And the fiscal reality is that that defense budget is going to go down, whoever wins the White House in November. The challenge for either Obama or Romney is how to manage that drawdown sensibly. The experience of the 1990s, when the defense budget declined 30 percent in constant dollars, says it can be managed with no sacrifice to our national security. That's the debate we should be having on defense, not a phony argument about shares of GDP.

John Lehman, one of the leading candidates to be secretary of defense in a Romney administration, has laid down the law. Or, in fact, two laws. Or, to be even more precise, laws that directly contradict each other.

The first law is that it is high time for a military buildup. In an interview with Defense News published over the weekend, he boldly put flesh on Gov. Romney's commitment to buy 15 ships a year (we have been averaging around 8-9 a year for the past 20 years). Lehman not only promised 15 a year for ten years, but he said the goal was a 350-ship Navy (right now it is around 286).

He endorsed building an additional aircraft carrier wing, even though, with one carrier regularly in overhaul, ten is enough. He promised to start a new frigate program (the Navy has no requirement for one), to increase the rate at which the Navy buys submarines and destroyers, to start a completely new missile defense ship, and to buy all the amphibious ships the Marines could possibly want (even though the size of the Marine Corps is planned to shrink over the next three years).

He didn't offer any justification for this Navy expansion (perhaps a former secretary of the Navy doesn't need to). More important, he ducked when he was asked how it would be paid for: "I wouldn't put a number on it until we see what kind of -- we're not talking about we're going to run faster, jump higher, be more efficient." Seems to be a quarrel he has with former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates about being more efficient.

But, as a former DOD official, he knows the problem, and it is about the enormous size of the Pentagon's overhead: "There's just a huge amount of bloat that has developed over the years. The bureaucracy itself has almost doubled what it was during the Reagan administration." The answer, Lehman's second law, sounds every bit as vague as the promises secretaries of defense have made for the last 50 years or more: "We're talking about fundamentally changing the method of doing business." Sorry, folks, no details on this law, just eliminate the bloat.

So his procurement plans would require multiple billions more funding -- he put no number on it, but Romney has talked about keeping defense at 4 percent of GDP, which would add $2 trillion to the current defense budget projections over the next decade. (A totally unrealistic promise, if Romney is going to fulfill his commitment to solve the deficit problem in the same time period.)

An increase of that kind would be a disincentive to any reform plans a Secretary of Defense John Lehman had in mind. Adm. Mike Mullen, when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs stated it clearly in January 2011: "The budget has basically doubled in the last decade. And my own experience here is that, in doubling, we've lost our ability to prioritize, to make hard decisions, to do tough analysis, to make trades."

Lehman is dead right about the bloat. He's dead wrong about the solution; the bloat would continue because, with a lot more money, the services would have no incentive to do otherwise.