This war is still going

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.