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“All of the sequester money has to come from Operations and Maintenance”. Not correct. Only military pay and wounded warrior programs are shielded. All other programs and activities are taking the same cut. The biggest problems are in the operations and maintenance accounts but that is because the other programs may have more flexibility in how they deal with the cuts.

Much of the size of the impact is due to political decisions made by this administration not to allow the services to plan for sequestration.

You are actually correct in part of your statement, but here is the real impact.

Military pay is exempt as you said. For now. Obama ordered that in July because he didn't want to deal with the political fallout in an election year with criticism that he "cut the troops pay." Now, he is going to cut troops - big time. He could care less about them.

The Army alone is going to gut their personnel strength:

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno said sequestration would force large end strength cuts, the extent of which are not yet known. For fiscal year 2014 and beyond, it will result in “the loss of at least an additional 100,000 personnel, soldiers, from the active Army, the Army National guard and the U.S. Army reserve,” he said. “Combined with previous cuts, this will result in a total reduction of at least 189,000 personnel from the force -- but probably even more than that.”

So, 26% of the DoD budget is off limits. The 19% that procurement takes looks like a player, but it isn't. We are halfway through the fiscal year. Many of those contracts are already signed. We get into legal territory now. Some of them could possibly be broken through a pause in orders, modifications, or partial terminations. But in the end, the lawyers always win. The DoD may end up owing more, so they are holding off with doing that....for now.

That leaves a very, very small piece of the pie to "pay" for this massive, massive cut (again, halfway through the fiscal year).

They can furlough civilians (funded by O&M funds), but that only buys the DoD $5 Billion between March and September, they need another $41 Billion, just until the end of the fiscal year!

In October, this all starts all over again.....for another 9 years!

And that is why the hollowing out of the force is going to be so drastic, so rapid, and so deep.

What really has to happen is Entitlement reform. Entitlements are out of control.

Much of the size of the impact is due to political decisions made by this administration not to allow the services to plan for sequestration.

See this thread:

use GOP blames DOD on sequester

The "fail to plan" blame game is a disingenuous political game that is boob bait for the bubba public. The House Armed Services Committee and Senate Armed Services Committee member of both parties privately told the DoD the sequestration cuts would not happen.

That is, until, the January Fiscal Cliff "deal" dealt with the tax issue half of the Fiscal Cliff, and only delayed sequester for 60 days. Congress refused to deal with it because it was too hard.

Obama actually gave in on the Social Security COLA reform in his negotiation with Boehner, but he wanted a raise in the tax rates for individuals making $500K a year - and Boehner would not go for it so he abandoned the talks and began his ill fated "Plan B" exercise that collapsed with a failure in support from even his own party.

Ashton Carter was correct today when he said that if the DoD had "planned" for this train wreck, Congress would have thought the DoD could live with it - and it cannot! They TOLD Congress this, and have been telling them that, for 16 solid months.

So no, I am not buying the "failure to plan" suitcase full of goods. I am not "planning" on catching Ebola tomorrow either. If I do, someone can't "blame" me for failing to plan for it. It is a disaster either way.