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 Senate appropriators have been struggling all week to complete a companion bill to the one passed in the House last week, providing money for this fiscal year for DOD and several other federal agencies.

The disagreements and more than 100 potential amendments (easier to offer in the Senate than in the House) have delayed consideration into next week, but it looks likely that there will be an FY 2013 appropriations bill for the Defense Department before they adjourn for Easter.

Meanwhile, both the House and Senate Budget Committees have reported out longer-term budgetary plans -- the budget resolutions -- that look at FY 2014 and beyond.

There is a fundamental reality about what the Congress is doing, one on which Secretary Hagel must focus. The signals are clear: The Senate and the House are not going to use the appropriations bills or the budget resolutions to bail out DOD from the sequester and a long-term drawdown in the defense budget. Time to wake up and smell the coffee.

Flexibility to deal with sequestration was one such signal. The House appropriations bill did not give DOD any greater flexibility than it now has to reprogram or transfer monies between accounts. It did increase operations funding, like the administration had requested, which raises the baseline from which sequestration would happen. And it provided some legislative relief from provisions in last year's defense budget, which would have hamstrung DOD unless they got a new bill covering this year.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski made a more direct attack to provide transfer flexibility. But it failed, and the reason for the failure is significant: Unless every agency got that flexibility, it was clear that it was not going to pass. Defense was not going to get special treatment.

Signal two is in the budget resolutions. As I noted earlier this week, Chairman Ryan's bill folded on the hope that DOD might get more funding in the long-term than the Budget Control Act caps passed in August 2011. He tried that last year and it went nowhere -- it wasn't even useful to Mitt Romney, who argued in his campaign that DOD should get four percent of the Gross Domestic Product.

This year, he abandoned that trench for the next one: holding the line at the BCA level for the next 10 years. That's probably the high-water mark, because Sen. Patty Murray's proposal takes another $240 billion out of the BCA funding levels over the next ten years.

The administration is going to send up its budget, one day. Maybe in early April. And it is going to be a mythical beast that ignores the signals. It will hope for the BCA levels, which is just plain unrealistic.

Secretary Hagel is supposed to send out guidance for the Department's next Quadrennial Defense Review next week. If realism is going to set in at DOD, that guidance had better make the QDR a resource-driven effort and start looking at decisions and options at budget levels below the BCA caps. That would send the internal signal the services need to hear.

There were always two shells in the double-barreled shotgun aimed at the Defense Department. One was sequester. The other -- the one the Pentagon was really worried about -- was the continuing resolution that expires March 27.

Well, now, the Congress has just begun to unload one of the two barrels. Although sequester is still underway, the House has removed a big source of the Pentagon's "sequesteria" by passing a real appropriations bill for the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs. (The rest of government will have to make do with the continuing resolution, which the bill prolongs through the end of the fiscal year.)

The bill, from the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Harold Rogers, did not attempt to fix the sequester -- as I predicted last week, that was too high a hurdle -- but it does make it easier for the Pentagon to survive. In writing a full appropriations bill, Rogers gave the Obama administration pretty much all the money it asked for in its request for crucial operational accounts. The bill increases the funds for operations and maintenance by more than $10 billion above the FY 2012 (and, thus, the continuing resolution) level.

That doesn't eliminate the sequester, but it raises the baseline from which sequester is measured for the accounts most directly affected. That gives some relief to the services, easing about 25 percent of the pain they see coming. And, who knows, if there is actually progress on the broader budget negotiations the president is lobbying for, the whole sequester thing itself might become meaningless.

That's the other big takeaway since we moved into sequester-land last Friday. Everybody is suddenly making nice. The president is phoning the Hill, even talking to Republicans. And Barbara Mikulski, the new chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, wants to write a bill similar to the House legislation, perhaps providing real appropriations language for a few more agencies and departments, rather than just prolonging the continuing resolution for everyone but DOD and Veterans Affairs.

So the March 27 deadline that I argued was the real deal may go away quietly. Some kind of appropriations bill will pass before then, in all likelihood. And the Pentagon seems likely to get the flexibility and additional funds it needs to avoid some of the damage expected from sequester. That has not prevented the "doomsday drumbeat" from continuing at DOD, with sequester threatening everything from readiness to the Asian pivot, to nuclear strategy, to band concerts. But some politics die hard.

Gee, have we entered an era of peace and budgetary harmony? Not likely. Paul Ryan's budget resolution for FY 2014 is coming next week; a Senate version from Patty Murray will follow. They will differ. And the Obama administration will send up its budget someday -- rumor has it either March 25 or April 8. And "Debt Ceiling: The Second Sequel" will hit theaters this summer. Lots of targets if anybody wants to continue to fight.

As we step onto the stage for the next act of the budgetary drama, things seem to make less and less sense. The budgetary solution shimmers on the road ahead, then evaporates as members of Congress repeatedly present legislation that either cannot pass or will not meet the needs of the other chamber.

Only the world of theater can provide the metaphors that describe where we are.

For the last two years I have been describing the budgetary point and counterpoint, the moments of high drama and unresolved outcomes, as an Indonesian shadow play. The budgetary players are actors manipulating two dimensional puppets, backlit through a white sheet. To the audience, the puppets seem real, the actions seem productive, but in the end it is a show.

Today, we have graduated from the shadow play and have entered a more surreal, or even nihilistic drama.

Might we be in a Pirandellian world, where six players (Boehner, Pelosi, Reid, McConnell, the president, and his veep) desperately try to figure out what the script is, what their roles are, and search for a playwright who can get them off the stage.

Or are we in the Sartrean world of No Exit, where nobody can get out of the room and the players all look smaller and smaller in each others' eyes?

Perhaps it is a Beckettian universe, an apparent Endgame which does not end, but is a series of meaningless interactions that end where they started, but actually went nowhere.

Or even the more nihilistic world of Macbeth, where the characters have become poor players who strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard no more. Players who have been weaving a horror story in the sky that is, in the end, a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing."

As John Boehner refuses to talk, the president shouts into the Learian wind about the storm to come, and senatorial fingers point at each other, we are, perhaps watching the surrealistic world described by Ionesco in the Bald Soprano. We can only exclaim, as his players do: "How curious! How bizarre, and what a coincidence."

How interesting to watch; how little to behold; how invisible the outcome. Only dramatists could improve on this "reality."

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.

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 dance performance at the edge of the cliff continues. Boehner offers to let taxes return to their pre-2001 level for the very, very rich. The president counter-offers, putting lower Social Security COLAs on the table, much to the consternation of AARP, who fill the in-boxes of people over 50 with protest (including mine).

Boehner, in theatrical frustration, moves to a Plan B that would have the House vote to raise the millionaire tax and spare the rest. Grover emerges from the dark shadow he lives in to pat Boehner on the back, saying a vote for the millionaire tax would not violate the no tax pledge the Republicans have signed, even though it does.

Meanwhile, in the defense world, nails are being bitten. Secretary Panetta warns of a cataclysm if the president and Boehner fail to agree. Buck McKeon steps to the mike in a redux of the performance he has been executing for 18 months (isn't he tired?), decrying the fact that the Boehner tax bill left the sequester on the table, and our national security open to the barbarians. In response, Boehner added a provision that would protect defense from at least part of the sequester. (Though sequester would take only 10 percent of the resources from one of the highest defense budgets America has seen since the end of World War II.)

A deal will come, but only when the dancers are exhausted with this increasingly embarrassing performance. And when it does, what will really happen to defense? If the White House offer is any indication, not much. Defense and domestic discretionary spending have been a "residual" in the budget negotiations for months, with entitlements and revenues the leading edge of the argument.

In its latest offer, the White House has reportedly said it would make another $200 billion in discretionary spending cuts, over ten years, split 50/50 between defense and domestic discretionary spending. That would be a laughable $100 billion less for defense over ten years from the current budget projection.

Yes, that is a cut, Virginia, as the current projection would give DOD growth at the rate of inflation. But as a budget proposition, it is a joke. Senate and House appropriators regularly, annually, find $5-10 billion tucked away in the defense budget that they can use to fund things the Pentagon did not ask for, but members want.

Where do they find it? In re-estimates of the payout rate on existing contracts, in lower than projected rates of inflation (the hidden secret of defense budgeting -- project high rates of inflation, then save and reprogram the money after you get it), in lower spending for operations and maintenance (just a general O&M cut by another name -- let the Pentagon find the savings), in finding operations savings in Afghanistan because the troops are coming home faster than expected (used that one once already; more to come).

Oh, there is a lot of slush of this kind in the DOD budget and the appropriators know how to find it all when the "members' requests" come in. So, go ahead, try to tell me that $10 billion a year less than the overall budget projection is tough to manage. It's not; it is a walk in the park.

Defense will be lucky to have this "cut." And, of course, the luck will not last. Every year for the next ten years there will be more nibbles at defense, because defense can "take it" in budgetary terms.

About ten years from now we will turn around and realize how deeply we have cut defense from the peak year (war and base budget) of fiscal year 2010. The way to count that is to take that peak year and draw a line, calculating what the defense budget would have been for the next ten years, had we simply increased that amount by inflation. Then draw another line -- the one that nibbles at DOD's budget every year for the next ten years. The space between those two lines will be more than a trillion dollars.

And if that drawdown is well managed, we will not even notice its impact. The forces will be smaller, but still globally dominant, doing everything we asked them to do. And we will have taken more than a trillion dollars from projected defense budgets, which is what so many "defenders of defense" are rending their garments over today. No sweat.

We are near the end of the 17-month drama of sequester and the defense industry's special pleading, and its special planning, are in the highest gear. The theater has moved along nicely.

We have been through the Sequester Prologue -- the Budget Control Act of 2011.

Act 1 was the Super Committee, a terrifying, cliff-hanger drama with a predictable outcome: failure.

Act 2 was the primary campaigns for the Republican Party and, especially, the adjunct campaign conducted by the Aerospace Industries Association and their political travelling side show: the McCain-Graham-Ayotte tour of America's most loved defense locations. But the industry failed to scare Americans away from fiscal discipline for the Department of Defense. Predictable outcome, since defense was not an issue in the primaries: failure.

Act 3 was the general election campaign. The industry backed off its warning of layoff notices four days before the election when a savvy administration pointed out that they, of all industries, would be most protected from sequester because they have existing government contracts, already funded, that ensure business would continue. (And as a sweetener, the administration also said the legal costs for any contractor sued because no layoff notice was sent, would be allowable cost under the contract.) Predictable outcome: the political side show sponsors felt undercut when the industry pulled back from playing politics; the president carried all but one of the states in which the side show had opened a tent.

Epilogue: where we are today. Defense budgets are a residual item in a much bigger main event over revenues and entitlements. Likely outcome: the defense budget will go down below the level Panetta proposed last February, to make a deal on everything else happen.

The defense industry has not given up the fight, though. And they are also ready for what may come, because they anticipate the market for defense goods better than anyone. Still girded for battle, defense industry chief executives such as Wes Bush, CEO of Northrop Grumman, and David Hess, president of Pratt and Whitney (United Technologies), will make their case on December 3 at the National Press Club. Perhaps no threat of layoff notices, but doom and gloom likely to be the message.

At the same time, the defense industry has been preparing for a defense drawdown for two years -- a realistic move because the defense budget has already come down for two years. Layoffs at large contractors have already happened. Less promising businesses have been sold (including CEO Bush's spinning off its shipyards last year). And companies are searching for acquisition opportunities in niche businesses that may prosper in the defense downturn: equipment servicing, drones, information technology, and cyber research and development.

Best of all, the industry has been churning up large piles of cash to finance these activities. Brendan McGarry of Bloomberg reported this week that the five largest defense contractors (Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics) have had operating margins that are at a record high, thanks to the generous defense budgets of the last ten years. More to the point, they used these margins to grow their cash holdings by 71% in the final quarter of the 2012 fiscal year, bringing their total cash holdings to more to nearly $21 billion. The average cash holding of the five was over $4 billion, nearly double what it was a year ago. These funds can be used for acquisitions, dividend payments, or held for a rainy day.

Smart thinking, corporate-wise. The rainy day is already on its way. The defense budget is headed down, even with a sequester-preventing deal, and, as Bloomberg's Kevin Brancato put it "Defense companies are likely to see cuts even if there's an agreement to avoid it." That doesn't stop the last-ditch epilogue battle we will see this month -- the show must go on!