Senator Harry Reid is about to become a magician. Next Tuesday he plans to introduce a bill that would eliminate the FY 2013 sequester, paying for it using ghost-like savings from the declining budgets for the Afghan war. And it sounds like the White House might just go along.

It's another parlor trick in a budget process full of such tricks, conjuring up savings and then, in this case, adding to the deficit by spending them. Let me explain, because it is all about scoring, but not about real money.

The Congressional Budget Office projects budgets into the future. When it does so, it has to start from something. Since this is a very conservative (small "c") organization, it properly starts from what is called "current law," or what the last appropriation was for something.

In this case, it is the last appropriation for the war. The Overseas Contingency Operations account, which funds the wars, was very high in the past -- nearly $180 billion at one point. The last time it was appropriated, in March this year, it was around $87 billion. So that is the current law number.

Now, when CBO looks into the future, it starts by saying $87 billion is the cost of the war. Since that is current law, the baseline for the future is $87 billion every year, plus inflation. Anything below that amount can be imagined to be "savings."

That's the parlor trick Sen. Reid is using. He is assuming current law, inflated, for the future, and then assuming that reality will be lower. The difference between the two numbers is the "savings ghost."

When Paul Ryan and the administration both used this trick in their budget proposals last year, they scooped up the budget "savings" and applied it, they said, to deficit reduction for the next 10 years.

There's just one problem: These savings are a phantom, a figment of Sen. Reid's imagination. The war is already winding down and everybody, including CBO, knows those numbers are fictitious.

But, ya know, they are easy, just sitting out there in fiction land waiting to be used, instead of knuckling down to the budget discipline the Congress and the White House ought to be enforcing.

And in this case, Sen. Reid doesn't intend to apply these savings to deficit reduction, which is bad enough. He intends to spend them, "fixing" the sequester, and, on the way, adding to the deficit.

It will be hard to resist this temptation; it's too easy. It is also wrong, exactly the kind of conjurer's trick that brings Congress into ill repute. It should be resisted, as the ghost of King Hamlet warned: "O horrible, O horrible, most horrible! If thou has nature in thee, bear it not."

The federal budget is coming out next week. The defense part has been declared dead on arrival because it does not take sequestration into account, just works off of last year's request and projects about a 3 percent cut in the Pentagon's funding, year over year. It will go down farther.

But what is more interesting is the extent to which fear about defense is being replaced by realism about the sequester and declining defense budgets. Both may be more absorbable than the rhetoric has been suggesting.

The hyperbolic rhetoric about the sequester is starting to fade with the disappearing charm of Leon Panetta. There's a new boss in town, and the noises over the transom, at least, suggest that calm may be returning to Pentagon waters. Secretary Hagel is warning of "significant changes" and the need to confront them as budgets go down: "There's no way around it," he said last week. (Though I've got to worry if House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon is happy with Hagel -- he's the guy who wanted the Senate to defeat the nomination a month ago.)

Realism is picking up steam in other places, as well. The Navy was going to keep ships in port, stop ship overhauls, and watch readiness tank before that full-year funding bill was passed. Now, with $4 billion more in operational funds than they had last year, it seems the Navy's worry-warts have been appeased and the planners can step in.

The chief of naval operations is on a more realistic message. Sequester is budget discipline: "It's causing us to make choices and prioritize anywhere from our operations to our maintenance to our investment accounts," Adm. Greenert told Navy Times.

Out there in the country, it seems "sequesteria" is starting to fade, as well. Taking a good look at defense dollars in California, Los Angeles Times reporter Jim Puzzanghera found that when you get away from the Aerospace Industries Association and George Mason Professor Stephen Fuller's "doomsday" megaphones, the local impacts of changes in defense spending are not that significant.

He quotes a regular student of the state economy, who points out that even beleaguered California has a $2 trillion economy, and it might face a $9 billion reduction in defense dollars.

I've been eyeing the California defense economy for more than 30 years, and the trend has been clear. Contractors started moving out of Los Angeles and planting stakes in places like Arizona and New Mexico more than 20 years ago. The bad news was they were leaving, and jobs went with them. The good news turns out to be that now when the defense industry starts to sniffle, LA does not catch a cold. Economic diversity has set in, and growth in other sectors has, over the years, filled the job hole.

Sometimes defense is just made to look bigger than it really is. Oh yes, the defense budget is large. At over $600 billion, how could it not be; it's the highest over the past few years it has ever been in constant dollars. That will help cushion the effect of the drawdown on the military -- there's lots of room for consolidation and choice.

But, all the models aside, it is not going to sink the economy. It just plain isn't as much of the economy as it used to be: nearly 10 percent of the Gross Domestic Product in the 1950s, to an average of 3.8 percent at the height of the Bush war effort over the past decade. Defense has stayed large -- very large -- but the economy has grown exponentially.

Fear makes a good story; realism and planning are a better reality. Maybe we're coming back to earth.

The budget crunch on defense and foreign policy has me thinking: While Congress is off on its merry pursuit of Passover or Easter and the White House is preoccupied with bringing peace (again!) to the Middle East, this is a good time to think about how we really ought to engage the world.

Not the phony baloney about the "indispensable nation," attributed to Madeleine Albright and believed by too many in Washington. There are plenty of folks ready to dispense with us, especially after the travesties in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not the "declining power," which is only the shadow side of aggressive, neoconservative interventionism. It's all about our power, you see. With it, we "shape" the international environment (or just write the rules ourselves when we are being really outrageous). Without it, global security is done for and anarchy will break out -- terrorists on all fronts, nuclear weapons on every corner.

How about some plain old common sense? The United States is just another country -- a big one, with big interests and big capabilities, but still just one in a world crowded with countries and problems that need to be solved. We cannot write all the rules; we can influence some of them. We cannot shape neighborhoods whose traumas and dilemmas are up close and personal to them (see Israel-Palestine, or China-Japan). Too often in the last 10 years we have tried to write the rules, only to create new adversaries or stir up old ones.

I am not making a plea for withdrawal, but for modesty -- modesty in ambition and expectations. It's a good moment for modesty. Everyone's resources are stretched; internal dilemmas (some with external instigators -- see Russian money and Cypriot banks for a nice synergy) are barking at every national and regional door.

John McCain called people who see wisdom in modesty "wacko birds" the other day, and Stephen Kinzer picked it up in his Guardian column today.

Well, count me a wacko bird, who wants neither to intervene with the Marines or special operations forces, nor to withdraw, but rather to remain engaged.

I will add my own twist to the wacko-bird manifesto. As we define more modest engagements, we need to demilitarize our foreign policy machinery so that we don't define every issue as solvable with military force. The Pentagon and the uniformed military should not define the framework for our global engagement; they should proudly and competently support our statecraft.

We should be sending advisors to governments seeking to create effective, efficient, and accountable governance, not sending "security" trainers to beef up other countries' militaries and internal police forces before local civilian officials know how to handle them.

We should have a diplomatic and foreign assistance capability that can prevent and resolve conflict and advise on governance, not one that backs away from this kind of engagement and restricts itself to representing the United States and reporting on events. And we should use this capacity modestly, for the task is large and we cannot "shape" it either alone or in our image.

A changed perspective on how we engage the rest of the world is a big part of the answer to the endless thrashing about of the past 20 years. Liberal international interventionists have had their day, and paid the price. Conservative regime changers have shamed themselves adequately (though to read the reviews on Iraq 10 years later, there seems be a shortage of shame. Doug Feith? Really?)

Time for the wacko birds. Sign me up.

It is the budget war, and the Pentagon has not given up fighting -- to the point of creating an endless stream of propaganda-like appearances and news pieces, many of them circulated by the American Forces Press Service.

These cute 2-3 minute video pieces are usually introduced by a uniformed officer or senior enlisted person, as if they were straight news and information pieces. They have been clogging the Pentagon's Daily Digest Bulletin, and my in-box, for weeks.

They were highlighted last week by my colleague Mark Thompson, of the TIME Battleland blog with the title "None Dare Call it Propaganda." They tell the sad tale of the sequester's damaging impact on the DOD health system, the suspension of tuition assistance, the loss of readiness.

Sometimes they are right -- civilian furloughs would lead to lower income for the last seven months of the year and, as a result, lower contributions to a civilian's TSP account. Sometimes they are exaggerations -- Gen. Dempsey yet again telling us military readiness will fall off a cliff, when, managed properly, it will not.

And sometimes they are pure fiction. The fiction type appeared in Saturday's Daily Digest Bulletin with the alarming headline: "Sequestration Threatens to Force Service Members to Quit."!!! This postage stamp of a video (30 seconds) culls an excerpt from the visit to Ft. Lewis-McChord of Sgt. Major Bryan Battaglia, said to be a "top advisor" to Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey.

Battaglia, on camera, says that one effect of sequester is that there will "probably" be an increase in the numbers of soldiers, sailors, and airmen "that will have to leave our force." The unnamed uniformed reporter in the piece then quotes unnamed "officials" as saying that while some force reductions are planned and others will happen by attrition, "many will simply be laid off."

It is hard to imagine a longer string of misinformation. Military personnel, their pay, and their benefits are exempt from the sequester; there ought to be no military layoffs at all as a result of the automatic cuts. Moreover, reductions in the ground force are already underway, independent of sequestration, returning the ground forces to roughly where they were before the addition of 100,000 troops to rotate through Iraq and Afghanistan.

That decline in the ground force is normal after a war, and not a result of the sequester. And it is likely to continue, as a consequence of a drawdown in the defense budget. Sequestration is not the cause; the drawdown is.

In all likelihood, the shrinking of the Army and Marines will happen by attrition, since we lose about 15 percent of Army enlistees every year. In the 1990s, the reduction of the overall military force by nearly 700,000 was accomplished largely by attrition. "Buy outs" come next, if the separation is involuntary. But pure layoffs almost never happen.

So I can only classify this report as propaganda: a message intended to inflame, but lacking analysis and seriously distorting the facts.

Make no mistake. We are in a defense drawdown. It's time to manage that process, instead of conducting silly propaganda exercises. And it's time for Secretary Hagel to bring some discipline to the American Forces Press Service, along with the rest of the Pentagon.

Well, the first round in the FY 2014 budget wars has begun. The Republicans, led by Paul Ryan, have made their latest offer in the non-stop non-negotiation on taxes and spending. And when it comes to defense, the Ryan Express is true to form: full of empty boxcars and misleading data.

The goal of the proposed resolution is, as it was last year, to "protect defense." Now, to be fair, his defense number -- $560 billion -- is about $15 billion below his number in last year's resolution. Slight dose of realism there.

But basically the Ryan Express defense boxcar is empty of any contribution to deficit reduction. It seeks to reverse the sequester on defense spending, something it does not do on the domestic side, by holding the defense budget flat (last year's budget plus inflation) for the next 10 years -- as if sequester never happened and never would, either.

Not enough, says the Heritage Foundation; more than we need or the Defense Department will ever see, say I. That level of funding would give DOD more than $6 trillion over the next decade. Heck, they will be lucky to see $5.2 trillion, in my view -- or something like a 20 percent cut in constant dollars below that flat line.

And there is a really misleading number in the middle of Ryan's discussion of the sequester's impact on the defense budget. Ryan says: "Though defense is about 20 percent of the budget, it's absorbing 50 percent of the cuts." This assertion takes the Express right off the rails.

Defense is only 20 percent of the budget if he includes entitlement spending. But entitlement spending is virtually immune from sequestration. The sequester hits discretionary spending -- the funds the appropriators provide each year to the federal agencies. Defense is more than 50 percent of discretionary spending, which doesn't make the sequester formula look so unfair, after all.

But, then, Ryan wants it to look unfair, hoping the Washington data mavens will miss the subtle change.

This Express is not going to move very far, very fast. It returns us to pre-sequestration days and is on a collision course with what Sen. Patty Murray is crafting in the Senate Budget Committee as we speak. Stay tuned for the sounds of the train wreck.

It has been said that the definition of insanity is continuing to do the same failing thing, hoping the outcome will be different the next time. A good part of the U.S. defense industry is clearly stuck in this pattern.

CQ/Roll Call ran a piece over the weekend that lays bare the time warp some contractors and their trade associations are stuck in.

The headline talks about how the industry is facing its "moment of truth." The content makes it clear that the industry, and its spokesperson, the Aerospace Industry Association, is far, far from facing the truth about the defense budget.

If this piece is any indication, the industry continues to live in a hermetically sealed box, telling itself its own dream-like stories, and expecting to be "saved" by actors on the Hill who are in the box with them.

The reality is that sequester is now underway, not because the industry lobbying campaign failed in some technical way, as some in the industry seem to think. Millions of dollars ($27 million in campaign contributions alone), numerous road shows (McCain, Graham, and Ayotte visit carefully pre-selected friendly audiences), thousands of interviews (will Buck McKeon ever sit down?), factory-floor lobbying, visits to the Hill -- they were all done to a fare-thee-well. These are tried and true lobbying techniques, which I described at length in my 1980 study, The Iron Triangle.

But the techniques only work if the message is in tune with the voters at large and the majority of the members of Congress. The industry's problem is not technical, it is the failure to recognize we are in a defense drawdown. The budgetary party is over.

Defense budgets rise and fall in response to changing international and political conditions. And those have changed dramatically: The end of the war in Iraq and the coming end of the war in Afghanistan lower significantly the level of public and congressional attention and concern about national security.

And some in the industry seem not to have noticed that we are in a major budget battle, and have been for two years. It is a much bigger battle than the one over the defense budget; that smaller fight is a side show. And as long as some Democrats do not want to change entitlements and Republicans do not want to put tax expenditures on the table, the drive-by budgetary victim of that battle is discretionary spending.

Last time I looked, defense was about 55 percent of discretionary spending, and the third largest cause of the U.S. debt more than doubling since 2001. Of course it is on the table; does the industry still think it is going to get a pass?

The days of ever upwards on defense are over. Sequester or not, defense budgets are going down and sequester just accelerates the pace. The industry should be prepared for the projected defense budgets over the next 10 years to fall at least 20 percent in constant dollars, or roughly a trillion dollars from the current forecast of more than $5 trillion.

When the industry still tries to argue that Leon Panetta "cut" defense $487 billion over 10 years, when all he did was flatten the projected growth in defense, leaving it to grow with inflation, they are not being realistic.

When they think Rep. Harold Rogers, the appropriations chair in the House, is going to save their bacon by giving DOD flexibility on sequester, when that will never survive the Senate, they are not being realistic.

When they think just a little more money to the Aerospace Industries Association to fund more misleading studies about the jobs impact of sequester will be adequate to turn the public around, they are not being realistic.

The realistic companies have been coping for two years: attrition and layoffs, buying in capacity they used to contract out, selling divisions that are less strong in a declining market -- they know what to do. The rest of the industry seems to be howling into the wind.

Welcome to the Pentagon, Mr. Hagel. And, by the way, it's one more day before doomsday, before Armageddon, before the meat axe falls on the Pentagon.

Wait a minute. How could you possibly say this on your first day there: "It's the uncertainty of the planning, it's the uncertainty of the commitments, the uncertainty of what's ahead. We need to figure this out....We need to deal with this reality."

Didn't you get the memo Panetta left behind? Did you really retire the meat axe metaphor? On your first day???

How utterly refreshing! Send out a new memo. Remind the chiefs that the secretary is in charge; he is the decider. Remind them that they are to give you their best options. That they are to give you advice, not selection A on the menu, without disclosing selections B and C.

Before they rush up to the Hill once again to plead their case, remind them that they have to clear their testimony with you, with the civilian, with the secretary. That perhaps, just perhaps, a sequester, while a miserable way to run the Pentagon, may be something they need to learn to manage, not complain about.

When I read the remarks you made as secretary, my first reaction was, "how bland, there's nothing here." Then I thought about it. Yes, bland may be the best place to be -- bland, disciplined, and ready to do the job. Perhaps that's the best way to start.

Your job one is not Iran, not North Korea, not even Afghanistan. Your first job is management, and getting discipline back in the way we do our defense business. It hasn't really been there since the late 1990s. Budgets just grew like Topsy, and, with that, as Admiral Mullen said in January 2011, the building lost its ability to make the tough choices and set priorities.

Well, that's no longer an option. Budgets are already down 10 percent since FY 2010. The drawdown is here, sequester or not. So, here are your priorities:

Job one: See if you can convince the White House that flexibility is what you need, not more money. (And every federal agency should get it, not just the Pentagon.)

Job two: Work with Congress to settle the FY 2013 level of spending. If it is at the continuing resolution level, live with it.

Job three: Living with it means getting your arms quickly around the forthcoming Quadrennial Defense Review, the planning for which is just getting under way. Do the revolutionary thing: For the first time since 1993, make the review into a resource exercise. As Bernard Brodie put it years ago, "strategy wears a dollar sign."

Use that shrinking dollar sign to discipline the QDR. Strategy, yes, but within the resources we have available, not a blue-sky exercise that calls for everything the services can imagine they need. Discipline the analysis of risk in a world that poses no existential challenge to the United States. Measure carefully when and where the United States intends to engage its forces.

Use the QDR to force weapons systems choices and cost controls. Use it to shrink the back office -- the biggest in the world. Find your "bloat brush" and use it to scrub down unneeded offices, duplicative activities, excess staff. Bring the pay and benefits problems into the review and put some tough, but necessary, proposals before Congress. Make it clear to Congress that they have a choice: combat capability or an excessive infrastructure that needs another base-closing round.

The QDR is your best tool; it is there right now. The resource shrinkage is your friend; use it to put real choices on the table.

It's entirely OK with me if the rhetoric goes away, as long as the next step is quiet discipline that produces an even higher quality force that is cost-effective.

In the absence of the Congress -- now in recess -- the Army, Navy, and Air Force have continued to litter the universe with more confetti about sequester. For those of you familiar with Carl Builder's masterful study of military service culture, these recently released documents are a fascinating look at the different cultures of the three largest military services.

The Army document is classic Army. Fifty-five pages long, it marches a division, step-by-step, through the purported impact of sequester on every state in the Union. It is an overwhelming show of force, as recommended years ago by Colin Powell. And it says these terrible things will happen: "every base will be affected," and the Army "is taking action."

The Navy document is more succinct -- only 11 pages. And it is more honest. While it describes impacts, it also calls them "representative in nature" and "potential." It does not say these things are being implemented and it more carefully lays out the assumptions that lead to the impact. The tone is cautious and independent, like the Navy.

And the Air Force document is classic Air Force: one page, blunt, and in your face. A simple map of the United States, with data, state-by-state, of civilian furlough numbers, lost pay, and facility projects cancelled. No text, just the facts, ma'am. Like a quick air strike on a communications node -- accurate kill, as needed.

The trouble is, of course, that sequester has not happened. The secretary has not made choices; priorities have not been allocated. But the services have been let out to make the worst case they can. Only the Navy is straightforward in saying these are "potential" impacts, and that is true not only because sequester has not happened, but because the decisions and prioritizations have not been made.

Meanwhile, one wonders why these things are the outcome, and not others, in case of sequester. For example, Tom Vanden Brook in yesterday's USA Today highlights serious doubts about the Army's $250 million program to put otherwise inadequately employed social scientists out in the battlefield to assess the "human terrain." The program is not clearly value-added, commanders think, and internal Army documents apparently reveal incidents of sexual harassment, racism, and possible fraud.

The program is doubtless funded in the same operational accounts where cuts would purportedly hit the same civil servants the Army sequester briefing warns about. In the priority-setting process, it is a perfect candidate for elimination, and all the services have the flexibility, under sequester, to make such a choice. I would readily trade a civil servant's furlough for getting rid of social scientists used in this way.

The underlying problem is that the service briefings are not plans, they betray no underlying decision-making or prioritization. They are political documents, intended to instill fear and to bring politicians to the table.

And they are not working; for all the cacophony, almost everybody in Washington thinks we will blow through National Sequester Day (March 1), issue furlough notices (DOD's go out today, in advance of sequester), and lay out a menu of cut-backs.

Then the Congress will spend March focusing on the real issue: FY 2013 spending levels and what happens by March 27, when the current continuing resolution expires. Sequester madness will step aside, and the real budget battle will get under way.

If the services are lucky, they will get funding pretty much like the past fiscal year. And Congress may provide them with more flexibility to allocate those funds than the sequester would. Then the services would have to do the real management job, instead of the Washington Monument closings they are sending out now.

The big weapons have moved in. On February 13, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff went over the top of the trench, grabbed the biggest artillery piece he could find and charged the enemy, saying a sequester of the defense budget on March 1 would "upend our defense strategy," leave the U.S. open to "coercion," and force us to "break our commitments" to the troops, the defense industry, and our friends and allies.

What is this, a Saturday Night Live sketch? No, just another piece in the confetti-laden ticker tape parade the service chiefs and the chairman are leading around the friendly confines of the Armed Services Committees to beat back a sequester on defense.

He may convince the already-convinced members of the committee, but the almost comic rhetoric should not fool anyone else.

Let me say it again: Sequester would pose serious management challenges to the Department of Defense, no doubt about it. But the U.S. military is a dominant force, with few challengers. It is the only force capable of global sailing, flying, and deployment. The only one with global logistics, communications, intelligence, transportation, and infrastructure. It costs five times the that of the Chinese military, and accounts for 40 percent of the spending on all world militaries combined. It spends more money today than it ever has, in constant dollars.

They are an awesome bunch, and everyone around the world knows it. There is no way a sequester would leave this force or the country open to coercion.

Losing 10 percent of the planned resources in one year will change none of that. Properly managed, even sequester would be survivable, leaving a dominant military capability. Nobody has to revisit strategy -- the pivot to the Pacific would happen anyway, and, frankly, is more a matter of moving things around than adding new military kit to the region. We have left and are leaving the two big combat operations, substantially increasing planning flexibility -- every other deployment (Sahel, Horn of Africa, Philippines) involves a tiny fraction of the overall force.

And as for that "commitment" observation, pay and benefits for the troops are untouched by sequester, leaving the commitments intact. And the industry figured out two years ago that the defense budget was going down. They have been consolidating capacity, shrinking the workforce, bringing subcontracted business in house, selling assets for two years. Only this year are these long-term, sensible decisions being blamed on sequester; they were already happening and will continue to happen, with or without sequester.

And our friends and allies? In Europe they have already figured out that defense requirements need to be balanced off against broader fiscal and social needs, as we are only now doing today. And in Asia, a number of allies are starting to do exactly what we have been asking them to do for decades: Assume more responsibility for their own security. The United States will still be around, nonetheless.

But we must be in another act of the budget battle. The military has been pushed into the point of the spear as part of the pressure to get to a deal, so hyperbole commands the stage. Personally, I can't wait for the show to end.

You can see it in the charts.

Ships won't sail, tanks won't be repaired, troops at the front won't have bullets. Summing it all up, America will become a second-rate power, the outgoing secretary of defense said at Georgetown last week.

On Tuesday, the service chiefs will scatter themselves all over the Hill to spread the gospel, telling the Senate and House Armed Services Committees how truly, truly awful it will be if they lose 10 percent of their budget this year.

It's overwhelming. Or, it was, until I started reading a paper delivered by Richard Kohn, professor emeritus from the University of North Carolina, former Air Force historian, and one of the most respected students of civil-military relations in the country.

Kohn makes a fundamental point: The military today is exceeding its mandate in publicly lobbying for its budgets and intruding into the debate over the U.S. role in global security. He argues that "this willingness -- indeed, in some cases eagerness -- to strive to shape public opinion and thereby affect decisions and policy outcomes is a dangerous development for the U.S. military and is extraordinarily corrosive of civilian control."

Kohn asks the tough question: "Is it proper for the four services, the regional commanders, or the Joint Chiefs every year to advocate to the public directly their needs for ships, airplanes, divisions, troops, and other resources, or their views on what percentage of the nation's economy should go to defense as opposed to other priorities?"

Put another way, in the policy universe, the military service chiefs are risking their credibility by such naked promotion of their budgets and service interests. Yes, and they've been doing so for about 15 years now, encouraged by a Congress fighting partisan warfare.

In fact, what stimulated me was a footnote in the article -- a footnote that sounded so strikingly familiar that today began to feel like déjà vu all over again, as Yogi would say. It was the headlines that grabbed me: "New Commandant Intends to Push for More Resources for Pentagon"; "Marine Commandant Calls for Defense Spending Increase"; "Outgoing 6^th Fleet Commander Warns Fleet Size is Too Small"; "Admiral: Navy Pales to Past One"; "Senior Navy Officers: ‘We Need More Ships, Planes, Subs'"; "Budgets Need to Support Our Tasking"; "Help Keep This The Greatest Navy." They're all from 1999 or 2000.

Sound familiar? Listen to what the service chiefs say Tuesday and it will. There is never enough; the budget can never be cut; we are losing our edge; sequester will weaken our military power.

The secretary should have reined them in, not unleashed them. The test for the services is not how well they advocate, nor how thoroughly they exaggerate the consequences of choice-making, nor how public they become. The test for the next secretary is how truthful he will be and how firmly he sets the tone for the department and the service chiefs. And the test for Congress is whether it can set partisanship aside and stop pulling the service chiefs into the fray as battering rams to flail away at the other side.

One can always hope.

You think the Pentagon would learn. But, no, there may even be a payoff in being ill-behaved on your spending: when you get into deep trouble you made for yourself, you just take yourself hostage and threaten to pull the trigger.

Two years ago, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen warned that "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."

Seems like the Pentagon didn't get the memo and has been overspending its allowance. According to a Politico piece today from David Rogers, one of the best budget writers in town, DOD decided last September it would just keep spending on operations at the rate they had asked for in the FY 2013 budget request they sent to Congress a year ago.

Some kind of denial must have set in. The continuing resolution funded DOD through March 27 of this year at the FY 2012 rate, which means the 9 percent growth in operations spending the Pentagon wanted was not on the table, not yet.

Apparently, the Pentagon "bet on the come," assuming sequestration would not happen, and has merrily been funding operations (training, exercising, equipment maintenance, fuel purchases, services contracts, and, yes, operations in Afghanistan) as if the FY 2013 budget request were real.

Haven't they been watching? Even if we don't have a sequester, every analyst in town and on Wall Street has been saying the FY 2013 request is the best the Pentagon will do, and cuts are extremely likely, as part of a budget settlement.

Seems a bit irresponsible to spend when you know the money will not be there. Or is this a bizarre form of hostage-taking: if you don't do what I want, I will shoot myself...

Now, of course, we are being treated to round two of the "shoot myself" scenario, with dire, and highly vocal threats that we are headed for a readiness crisis of grand proportions. Readiness, which can be a refuge of scoundrels (especially when they don't define it), is funded largely in those same operations accounts. (See Panetta and Dempsey on the Sunday talk shows.) As I have already noted, this supposed crisis is way overstated, even though managing sequester levels of funding is a challenge.

Overspending your allowance is one way to get there, though. And the continuing resolution set a pretty clear level for the allowance. Overspend, and you run out of money earlier. And have to pull the trigger, especially if you are trying to prevent losing more money through a sequester.

Too cynical? Adm. Mullen was pretty realistic about the Pentagon's management problem. Either they did not hear him, or just willfully decided to ignore him and scream for help when they got into trouble.

I have been saying for some time that we are in a defense drawdown. It has already begun. Including war costs, overall DOD budgets are down more than 10 percent in constant dollars from the FY 2010 peak.

While some will immediately say that is because we left Iraq and drew down in Afghanistan (which is true), the so-called "base defense budget," which is largely interchangeable with the war budget, has also come down. It was flat in FY 2011 (no gains for inflation), down about 1 percent in FY 2012, and seems very likely to go down even further this year, with negotiations over sequester between now and March 1 likely to arrive at an agreement that includes more defense reductions.

A drawdown is realistic. What is unrealistic is the Pentagon's current expectation and planning projection that defense budgets will keep up with inflation over the next ten years. While Secretary Panetta likes to claim (he did so just last week in Europe) that he has cut $487 billion from future defense budgets, he fails to say that these "cuts" actually brought projected budgets down to where DOD would still keep up with inflation, or, in other words, continue to grow in current dollars.

We will go deeper. We have always gone deeper after a war. And the defense community in Washington, D.C. is substantially more realistic than the Pentagon leadership in projecting deeper cuts. The latest sign comes from the National Journal, which polled its large and highly diverse group of "national security insiders" last week, asking them how deep they thought the defense budget could go over the next decade.

Eighty percent of this group, which ranges from left to right, thought the budget would go down at least another $100 billion over the next decade. Thirty-five percent expected cuts of $100-300 billion; 21 percent thought they would range from $300-500 billion, while 24 percent (including yours truly) thought they would be at least $500 billion.

Those would be real cuts, below inflation. And a surprisingly large unanimity of view exists that such cuts are inevitable. Moreover, they would not be "doomsday." A $500 billion reduction in currently projected defense budgets would be one of the most shallow drawdowns in our military history, below those after Korea, Vietnam, and the end of the Cold War. It would leave the Pentagon with $5.3 trillion in discretionary funding over the next decade (excluding any residual funding for overseas contingency operations, which could be as much as another $500 billion).

If sequester hits, these cuts will start right away. Even without sequester, such cuts are realistic and a form of budgetary discipline DOD has not had for more than a decade. It would be good for the Pentagon and likely Secretary of Defense Hagel to focus on this number as the budget negotiations move forward and as planning for the next Quadrennial Defense Review get under way.

It appears there are second acts, or is it a third? Jim Rutenberg in the New York Times on Sunday described the "dramatic return to the public stage" of the neocons, who hope to finish off Chuck Hagel's nomination with theatrically embellished claims about his stances on Iran and Israel.

There would be no such drama and no return to the stage but for the eagerness of media editors to stimulate the appearance of a conflict. These folks -- the William Kristols and Elliott Abramses of the policy right -- should be condemned to the dustbin of history for their fatally mistaken fantasies that left a deep, lasting, and negative legacy for U.S. security interests and goals around the world. Kristol is certainly no "mainstream internationalist," as he tries to repaint himself in the Times story; he is a policy extremist, one among many who caused this damage over the past decade.

They fantasized hegemony -- that the 21^st century would be an "American century," with U.S. military power ensuring dominance, stability, and the ability to shape events around the globe. But the 21^st century, as a recent National Intelligence Council report makes clear, is a global century, with changing coalitions and rising powers, not ours to dominate.

They hoped that sending American men and women in uniform into Iraq in sheer ignorance of the political and cultural conditions on the ground would instantly install democracy (it didn't), eliminate a sponsor of terror (it was not), and end a threatening program of weapons of mass destruction (there weren't any).

That a surge left in place a shaky and hardly democratic regime and a country in shreds is no victory; it is escaping a bad situation without tar and feathering on the way out. They screamed that we should have left troops there to prevent disintegration, ignoring the reality that the presence of U.S. troops could only delay a resolution of Iraq's historic and internal cultural conflicts, at the cost of a continuing loss of American life.

They hoped to eliminate the Taliban as a host to al Qaeda by invading Afghanistan. They accomplished about a third of that task (throwing out the Taliban, but not eliminating it) and then completely dropped the ball in their eagerness to take on Saddam Hussein.

The Taliban returned, the new government sank into the cesspool of corruption too common in that country, and the Obama administration is now coming to terms with the reality that more American soldiers cannot reshape Afghanistan (any more than the Russians or the British could), and it is time to come home.

And it took a focused, disciplined effort on the part of a non-neocon administration to find and eliminate Osama bin Laden, a mission at which the neocons had failed miserably.

Now the chickenhawks are gearing up to send U.S. soldiers into the field again, this time into Iran. For them there will be no staying the hand of an Israeli government determined to go to war; America's fighters must pay the price. They worry that Chuck Hagel might not share this new fantasy.

Have they no shame? Clearly not. Not a lick of embarrassment crosses their faces. It is as if the past does not exist; it's as if they could airbrush the last ten years off the map of history and the nation would forget. Sadly, too many members of Congress are prepared to bluster with them.

I have been clear that I would like some very tough budgetary and managerial questions to be put to the nominee for secretary of defense. Even if he is not deeply steeped in the internal workings of DOD, and he is not, it will be critical for him to focus on managing a defense drawdown in a responsible and balanced way, and not to become a pure mouthpiece for "more" or "holding the line." For a drawdown is surely underway.

But Hagel is vastly more qualified than some to be secretary and certainly more focused on the world as it is, not as the neocons fantasize it to be. Their fantasies have damaged America's reputation, its ability to lead, its national security interests, and left too many soldiers and their families dead or damaged beyond repair.

The epilogue of the sequester drama is nigh; the fiscal cliff looms, and once again the Pentagon has yielded to the temptation to describe a fantasy past and a fantasy future, in the hopes of avoiding the inevitable: a defense drawdown. Will they never learn?

For the Department of Defense, we would all be Katherine, the Shakespearean shrew, once broken. We should cry out, as Secretary Panetta asks us to: "sun it is not, when you say it is not; and the moon changes, even as your mind. What you will have it named, even that it is; and so it shall be still for Katherine."

The past, our last three drawdowns, were the worst of times, as Secretary Panetta said yesterday: "We have been determined to avoid the approach taken in past drawdowns, where, as I said, there were deep, across-the-board cuts that hollowed out the force and weakened our military, left the military demoralized and unready to carry out the missions assigned to it."

And yet, as Galileo suggested, it is not so. Two of the last three drawdowns were well managed and thought out. And even including the uneven one, America's military remained a globally capable and dominant force. After Korea, President Eisenhower drew down the ground force and brought the budget close to balanced. We still had a ground force, a navy, an air force, and military power that bestrode the world like a colossus. It was not hollow, it did not fall faint to the floor in pitiful sorrow. Morale was high and no adversary crossed the line.

After the debacle that was Vietnam, Secretary Laird and President Nixon devised a realistic strategy of 1.5 wars (down from over two), and transitioned the forces from conscript to volunteer, as they are today. The Army did, indeed, warn of hollowness; it was our least well-managed drawdown. But, setting aside the hysteria at the time of the Committee on the Present Danger, America retained the globe's most powerful military capability; the nation remained secure, and the forces were strengthened. Looking backward, historians have concluded both the threat and the weakness were exaggerated.

At the end of the Cold War, President Bush, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell developed the force planning algorithm (it was not a strategy) of two major regional contingencies, leading to the base force, and the third and last Cold War drawdown. In their tenure, the active duty force shrank by 500,000 troops and the budget by 25 percent in constant dollars.

The last stages of that drawdown took place during the first Clinton term. The OMB, led by Secretary Panetta, oversaw the budget planning for that drawdown and set the overall budget plan that ultimately led to two things: 1) the first sustained federal budget surplus since Eisenhower, and 2) the best managed defense drawdown we have seen. The ground force shrank, the Pentagon managed better, and the force that was in place used Saddam Hussein as a speed bump. It was neither hollow nor weak.

America's military was always, and remains, a globally dominant force, as it has been for the past sixty years.

If we are to believe the Pentagon, the future is worse than we have ever seen, full of fearful threats, "threats that are more complex, more dispersed, and in many ways, more dangerous." Terrorists coming at us from all sides, IEDs constantly aimed at our troops, a rising China, a Middle East in turmoil. Is fear the only basis on which we can sustain unprecedented defense budgets at a time of minimal threat?

We do not face any existential enemy. An overwhelming swath of the globe is at peace, from Latin America, to Europe, to Asia. And a "rising China" is far from a military threat, rather a broad relationship to be managed.

Where there is trouble -- the Middle East -- is in the region where we are drawing down militarily. Secretary Panetta said, "Even after the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, we have maintained a substantial military presence in the Middle East in order to deter aggression, respond to crisis, ensure regional stability in the face of historic unrest and the continuing threat from Iran."

Indeed those forces are there, but the ambition is an unachievable overreach for the military. Our forces are secondary, even tertiary, as an instrument for our statecraft in Syria, or Egypt, or Lebanon. They will not now, not in the future, invade Iran or Pakistan. Large or small, our military forces will not shape the region. The changes under way there are "far above our poor power to add or detract."

We can do so much better than this. Even a sequester does not mean the end of our military capability. Defense would lose 10 percent of its resources in this fiscal year -- serious, but not unprecedented and hardly the end of the world. Military personnel, retirees, and benefits would be exempt from the sequester. Contractors, who are hard at work on contracts already obligated, would anticipate that the next round of contracts might be 10 percent smaller than they hoped. Say, as Deputy Secretary Ash Carter did in August, from 29 F-35s to 25 in FY 2013. Service planners would have loose rein in the operating accounts to execute tradeoffs. The level of research and development effort would shrink by 10 percent, hardly a disaster.

This is not "doomsday," it's just a silly and arbitrary way to manage a drawdown. The Department knows it has not yet cut the projected defense budget; Secretary Panetta's "cuts" of $487 billion only reduced anticipated growth, leaving the defense budget growing with inflation over the next decade. If past is prologue, it will go down deeper. Would that the Pentagon engaged in less drama and began to plan sensibly for the drawdown everybody knows is realistic, safe, and already under way.