If either of those scenarios takes place, press secretary George Little said, “we would be looking at, in all likelihood, the smallest Army and Marine Corps in decades, the smallest tactical Air Force since [the branch] was established and the smallest Navy in nearly 100 years.”

George Little

Automatic cuts to the Defense Department would take place, through the 2011 Budget Control Act’s sequestration mechanism, if the Committee members don’t offer a plan to reduce the deficit by Nov. 24. The cuts would also take place if the whole of Congress fails to adopt a plan by the Committee in December.

For the Defense Department, that means another $500 billion from defense spending over 10 years, on top of $350 billion in cuts already identified over the same period.

The department has been looking at hundreds of millions of dollars in budget cuts and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has been adamant, Little said, that moving to sequestration would be a “devastating” scenario for the nation’s security.

The secretary “has reiterated time and time again that we don’t have to choose between our fiscal security and our national security,” Little said, “but if we go to sequestration, we would very well have to make that choice.

Little said that $1 trillion in cuts would make it necessary for the Pentagon to break faith in some areas — including jobs and salary benefits — with those in uniform who are serving the nation.

“In a time of war,” he said, “that’s unacceptable.”

At the Pentagon, internal analysis shows that sequestration also would have a profound impact on the U.S. industrial base, he added, by threatening many of the 3.8 million military and civilian jobs that the sector represents.

“We’re not talking about just military jobs, we’re also talking about jobs in the private sector that support the innovation and creativity and capabilities that we need to keep America strong,” he said.

Moving to sequestration and the additional budget cuts it would require, department officials believe “would potentially add 1 percent to the national unemployment rate,” Little said.

Panetta, he added, has made Congress aware of the consequences of such deep defense cuts.

“We want to make it very clear [to everyone] that sequestration is a red line that this government should not cross,” Little said.

“Barry Goldwater once said, ‘You don’t have to be straight to shoot straight.’ I say it’s time for some straight talk on this issue. The Pentagon says it’s ready. Our troops say they’re ready. The American people say they’re ready. It’s time for us to get it done,” Udall, a member of the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence committees, said of the repeal.

“I opposed ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ when it began, and 18 years later, there’s ample evidence that the policy is harming our national security by hindering our ability to recruit and retain troops while we’re fighting two wars.

“Ending ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ has been supported by military leaders from former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who said repeal is about ‘common sense and common decency,’ to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen, who said it was ‘the right thing to do.’”

When he introduced legislation in 2010 to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, Udall explained that the policy had wasted hundreds of millions of dollars and negatively effected the lives of thousands Americans dedicated to their country.

“I feel very strongly about this,” he said. “More than 14,000 service members have been discharged in the last decade. These are jet pilots, translators of Arabic, Farsi, Pashtun– languages so important in the War on Terror. All the skill sets needed in the military are met by gay Americans.”

Udall said the process of identifying gay members and discharging them was costly and counterproductive. Government accountants estimated that the policy cost the country more than $200 million since its implementation.

“We train these men and women and prepare them for duty. It’s a major investment in time and energy and money.Then we spend all this time and energy and money discharging them.”

Udall said he talked to gay and straight service members and veterans who agreed the policy was outdated and detrimental.

“Repeal has been studied extensively by groups inside and out of the military,” he said in today’s release. “We’ve had numerous congressional hearings. We know that more than 20 countries successfully allow open military service.

“The Pentagon has been given the time and flexibility our leaders said they needed to implement repeal. It’s been studied, and the conclusion is clear: It’s past time for repeal.”

Capitol Hill Republicans fought the repeal even after military leaders testified that they supported it and that repeal would not compromise readiness or security.

In their letter to Panetta, McKeon and Wilson argued that the Pentagon was somehow unprepared for official repeal because their committee had yet to receive copies of the various armed services regulation and policy changes that would occur as a result of the repeal.

“The Department of Defense is not ready to implement the repeal because all the policies and regulations necessary for the transition are not yet final,” the congressmen wrote.

Coming less than a week before repeal, the letter has been widely viewed as a political stunt or last-ditch salvo to hold back change.

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The selection of two outsiders — Petraeus has no experience in the realm of pure intelligence work, while Panetta hasn’t had military experience, other than tangentially in his two years as CIA director, since his discharge from the Army in 1966 — to fill the posts may seem an odd choice. The two men’s backgrounds, however, may provide clues as to why each was chosen for the job.

Petraeus’s popularity, spanning both party lines and the civilian-military divide (at least among members of the public who know who he is), is sure to be an asset in the position, as it has been in his capacity as the head of military operations in Afghanistan. More pointedly, Wired’s Spencer Ackerman theorizes that Petraeus’s endorsement of unmanned drone strikes and special operations raids like those undertaken in Afghanistan and Pakistan hews closely to the Obama administration’s preferred methods of using the CIA in counterterror efforts, with drone strikes and shadow operations.

Panetta, meanwhile, got the CIA post to begin with in part because of his success steering President Bill Clinton’s Office of Management and Budget through the fat years of the mid-‘90s. Panetta later became Clinton’s chief of staff. His experience with budgets — he also headed up the House Budget Committee for years prior to leaving the world of elected office for Clintonian pastures — could be a sign that the administration is looking for a numbers man to justify bloated defense spending. Until the administration officially confirms its picks, however, it won’t be forthcoming with explanations for its choices.

The news hasn’t inspired a uniformly optimistic reaction from intelligence or defense insiders. Ackerman reports in Wired that Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the left-leaning National Security Network, contends that Panetta, at least, will be entering a no-win situation once he takes over the Defense Department:

“He’ll never live up to what building wants or has come to expect,” Hurlburt says of Panetta. “Gates tried to prepare them that this is coming, and cushion the building for what’s coming, but that’s not tenable. It’s an unenviable task.”

The response from the right has been similarly lukewarm:

[H]e’s generating cautious, first-blush optimism from defense watchers, even among the administration’s political opponents. “Safe choice,” says James Jay Carafano of the conservative Heritage Foundation, which has accused Gates and Obama of cutting defense too deeply. With both Petraeus and Panetta, “no one is going to question whether they are qualified.” Even Gates’ predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, no fan of Obama, tweeted that Panetta and Petraeus are “outstanding leaders.”

Ackerman does not mention, however, that Rumsfeld’s tweet on Panetta and Petraeus was qualified by a followup:

…5 DCIs 5 US ambs & 7 mil cdrs in Afg over 7 yrs: No matter how capable the individual, musical chairs makes it impossible to find footing

Rumsfeld’s un-self-conscious criticism of the U.S.’s handling of the war in Afghanistan comes despite his role as the U.S. Defense secretary during the initial invasion, as well as the invasion of Iraq.

The long statement conspicuously withholds approval for Clapper’s nomination. “I am very much in favor of a strong DNI, which I believe to be essential to national security,” Feinstein clarifies, and to that end, she says she wants to hear what Clapper thinks of the expanded authorities for the job that she put in last year’s intelligence bill. (The relevant sections begin with Section 303, for those keeping score.) Before she takes up Clapper’s nomination in committee — “we are now preparing questions,” she pledges ominously — she wants the committee to finalize next year’s intelligence bill, and strongly hints that bill will contain provisions that give the nation’s top intelligence chief greater authority over the Defense Department intelligence assets Clapper currently overseas.

Key to Clapper’s nomination, Feinstein hints, is his answer to “whether he believes a stronger DNI would weaken the authorities of the Secretary of Defense.” That’s the oversight equivalent of a well-forecast high inside fastball. But Clapper hinted in April that he doesn’t believe a DNI should hit for power. I’m going to stop this metaphor. But clearly the central question surrounding Clapper’s prospects for becoming DNI is, to put it cynically, whether he’ll tell Feinstein what she wants to hear.

The full statement follows:

“I intend to meet with General James R. Clapper in the next couple of days to discuss his nomination to be the next Director of National Intelligence. In line with the standard Committee process for reviewing nominees, we are now preparing questions for General Clapper to answer before we will hold a confirmation hearing.

I intend for the Committee to do its due diligence on General Clapper’s nomination, as we do for all nominees. I am particularly interested in his views on the powers of the DNI, the appropriate role of the DNI with respect to agencies within the Department of Defense, and his views on the importance and appropriate role of congressional oversight of intelligence.

I believe that any DNI will be effective only if he has the authority – both on paper and in practice – to oversee and have strategic direction over the 16 agencies that make up the Intelligence Community. I am very much in favor of a strong DNI, which I believe to be essential to national security. The Fiscal Year 2010 Intelligence Authorization bill provides additional authorities and flexibilities for the DNI, and I will ask General Clapper his view of those provisions, and whether he believes a stronger DNI would weaken the authorities of the Secretary of Defense.

The Intelligence Authorization bill is the Committee’s top priority right now. We have already begun to review General Clapper’s record, and I would intend to take up his nomination once the authorization bill is passed.”

“I have concerns about Clapper as a choice,” committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-CA, told The Cable in an interview, saying that the widely expected nomination of Clapper, who now is under secretary of defense for intelligence, would give the military too much control of the intelligence community. “The best thing for intelligence is to have a civilian in charge. The elbows are less sharp.”

In a bit of irony that surely warms hearts at Langley, Feinstein’s choice for the nation’s top intelligence post is — wait for it — Leon Panetta, the CIA director whose nomination Feinstein initially fought hard to scuttle. I suppose you could be cute and suggest that Feinstein secretly just wants the bureaucratic meatgrinder that is the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to finally grind Panetta’s flesh and bones. But most likely she’s just been impressed by his job as CIA director.

And so has Kit Bond (R-Mo.), the committee’s GOP vice chairman. Rogin further reports that there’s no daylight between the committee leaders on who they want for Blair’s job. Panetta is “the only one who has the clout to make it work,” Bond told Rogin, “I have reservations about [Clapper] in that job.”

Does Clapper’s (possible, prospective, never official) candidacy survive public opposition from the leadership of the Senate committee that will have to approve him?

Speaking of Blair’s replacement, Feinstein doesn’t come out and say it, but her statement gives a cold shoulder to James Clapper, the Pentagon’s intelligence chief and Blair’s deputy for Defense intelligence, who’s reportedly the leading candidate for the job. “It will be important that any nominee is not beholden to the Pentagon’s interests and can, as needed, provide balance to civilian and military interests in carrying out the nation’s intelligence missions,” Feinstein said in the statement.

No one agency, particularly the Department of Defense, should control the flow of intelligence to the President. The majority of the intelligence budget is already executed by the Department of Defense, and it will always have a strong influence over the Intelligence Community’s operation. That should be balanced, however, by the need for the community to provide strategic intelligence beyond what is necessary for the warfighter.

On the one hand, Feinstein also opposed Leon Panetta’s appointment as CIA director until she got an assurance — in the form of Steve Kappes staying on as deputy director (he recently announced his retirement) — that Panetta wouldn’t jeopardize her prerogatives. On the other, Feinstein didn’t announce any opposition before Panetta’s nomination was announced.

But what did the Panetta-Jones trip reap from the Pakistanis? “Both parties acknowledged the extreme challenge of thwarting each and every plot and terrorist action, both sides pledged to intensify efforts, increase cooperation, and do everything possible to protect our citizens,” the statement reads. Here it is in full:

The productive discussions covered U.S.-Pakistan relations, the security situation in the region, the shared terrorist threat and fight against extremists, and the U.S.-Pakistan Strategic Dialogue. General Jones reiterated the United States’ long-term commitment to the strategic partnership with Pakistan, including support for creating economic opportunity for the Pakistani people. The talks provided an opportunity to review progress on the many areas addressed in the recent strategic dialogue held in Washington. Both sides expressed their commitment to strengthening ties across the broad spectrum of issues between our countries, including trade, economic growth, and development. The parties agreed to continue frequent government-to-government contacts and further senior-level engagement in order to advance our common interests and provide a better, more secure future for our people.

President Asif Ali Zardari said that militancy and terrorism was the common enemy and that the existing robust cooperation between the two countries must continue to fight the menace. General Jones and Director Panetta provided an update on the ongoing investigation into the Times Square terrorist incident. General Jones expressed appreciation for the excellent cooperation the United States is receiving from Pakistan as well as the tremendous sacrifice of the Pakistani military, law enforcement and people in their efforts to combat extremists. The talks covered measures that both countries are, and will be, taking to confront the common threat we face from extremists and prevent such potential attacks from occurring again and both parties acknowledged the extreme challenge of thwarting each and every plot and terrorist action, both sides pledged to intensify efforts, increase cooperation, and do everything possible to protect our citizens. President Zardari noted that Pakistan desires a long-term, multifaceted, and durable relationship with the United States which no incident should be able to adversely impact.

Watch if U.S. intelligence officials still tell reporters that Pakistan is withholding crucial terrorism intelligence after Jones and Panetta fly home.

The United States government delivered two Bell 412 EP helicopters to the Government of Pakistan today to assist the Pakistan military in its counterinsurgency efforts.

U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Michael Nagata handed over the helicopters to Brig. Gen. Tippu Karim, 101 Army Aviation commander, during a signing ceremony at Qasim Army Air Base near Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

By sheer coincidence, Karen DeYoung of The Washington Post reports that CIA Director Leon Panetta and Jim Jones, President Obama’s national security adviser, are headed to Pakistan to urge Pakistan’s civilian, military and intelligence leadership to take greater action against extremists in the tribal areas in the wake of the failed Times Square car bomb attempt. National Security Council spokesman Mike Hammer explains to DeYoung, “It is time to redouble our efforts with our allies in Pakistan to close this safe haven and create an environment where we and the Pakistani people can lead safe and productive lives.”

So do with those helicopters as you will…

Imagine that the military finds its information networks under attack. An investigation determines that the culprit of the attack is using civilian servers in a friendly country to penetrate CYBERCOM’s defense. What to do? And who gets to do it?

My understanding is that there’s an ongoing debate within the Defense Department and the CIA about whose responsibility is to take out those servers, as well as who actually possesses the authority to do so. These are probably not going to be the sorts of things that the U.S. government is going to take credit for doing — in other words, those will be covert actions. And “blurring” the uniformed military into the realm of covert action is murky territory. The 1991 Intelligence Authorization Act also suggests that if it’s covert, the CIA gets to do it.

So I asked Adm. Dennis Blair, the nation’s top intelligence officer, at today’s commemoration of the creation of his job five years ago, if U.S. Cyber Command and the intelligence community had established clear divisions of legal and policy authority or responsibility. “It’s a really dynamic area,” Blair replied. “Technology has developed far faster than [the] legal or policy framework.” So, in short, not yet. Blair added, “We’ll do what we have to to get it done.”

Kate Martin, the director of the Center for National Security Studies, observed that even outside of CYBERCOM, whose mandate remains rather unclear, there’s an “ongoing controversy about what kinds of military activities in the context of armed conflict with al-Qaeda are governed by the [legal] covert-activities requirement. That’s not even resolved, outside of the realm of cyberattacks.” Inside that realm, there are any number of questions about specific circumstances that would impact whether CYBERCOM is entering new territory. For instance, launching a direct attack on an enemy’s information network is a pretty traditional feature of warfare — you’re trying to disrupt his ability to command and control his forces. But what if elements of his offensive capability bounce around the world, through systems and virtual avenues controlled by parties that don’t have any stake in a given conflict? What if there isn’t a state of war declared?

In the case of taking out someone else’s servers, Martin mused, “It wouldn’t necessarily be a covert action, because you could argue that it’s closer to the military taking out a traditional supply line, and not using lethal force to do so.” So CYBERCOM might be in the clear there under existing authorities, even if Alexander told Congress that’s not the direction he wants to chart for the command. Or it might not be!

A spokesman for the CIA didn’t respond to a request for clarification. And I was unable to buttonhole Alexander at the ceremony today, although I saw him talking for a bit to CIA Director Leon Panetta and that naturally got my mind racing with speculation.

No one should labor under the misconception that Kappes is the linchpin of the drone-strike effort, which has many authors and advocates and structural factors pushing it forward. (Simply put, it’s what you do when you perceive a terrorist threat in a place you can’t invade.) But now that Kappes is out and his replacement is a longtime CIA analyst, not an operative, named Michael Morrell, it’s an open question whether Panetta and Morrell will shift the agency’s focus at all. The smart early money is probably not, since Panetta believes the strikes to be a smashing success. But watch his next round of congressional testimony to see if any post-Kappes shift is underway.