The only way they could have "planned" for this rapid a draw down would have been to take actions like stop awarding contracts, fired the term employees last year (which the DoD would have been destroyed by Congress for doing), and started to cut back on training and operations last year.
Ashton Carter was correct - "planning" for it would have enabled taking actions detrimental to national security before the election, some reversible, some not so reversible.
We raised taxes, but didn't apply ANY of that revenue to the sequester. The White House and Congress discussed all options (including entitlement reform), but it all fell apart.
So the DoD got nothing out of that whole mess except a delay. It wasn't the DoD that came up with this jacked up concept, or the formula that punished defense inordinately. It isn't the DoD who that is bankrupting the nation. Defense spending as a percentage of GDP is at historic lows. You can thank entitlements for that, yet, DC is trying to balance 3/3rds of the budget by cutting the 1/3 that is discretionary spending, with again - defense paying the biggest price.
Defense is Constitutional. Food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, TANF, and unemployment checks are not.
No segment of society has sacrificed more for this nation in the last decade since 911, and Defense is being pushed to the front of the fiscal firing squad by Washington.
We didn’t raise taxes. By budget, taxes were going to go up more. So the deal in January actually increased the deficit, which they then had to pay for by setting up a continuing resolution that slightly cut spending.
All the big deficit numbers were ASSUMING that all our taxes were going back up to pre-bush-year values.
It’s sad that a small decrease in the rate of growth of spending is considered a “rapid draw-down”.
The military was going to have some shrinking pains anyway, because they weren’t going to keep spending a lot of money for support personnel in this country for the wars we aren’t fighting anymore.