With Department of Defense budgets cuts on the horizon, the contractors are playing hardball. Last month, an article in Politico reported that defense contractors are threatening to send layoff notices to employees right before the 2012 presidential election. Their reason? The proposed ten percent cut in defense spending would force them to layoff hundreds of thousands of workers to stay afloat. However, a new article in Defence Professionals argues that the threat is nothing more than a veiled attempt to protect profit margins.

The article, written by Ben Freeman, an investigator for the Project On Government Oversight claims that the threats of layoffs are meant as a message to political incumbents: cut our budgets and we will bury your political campaigns. The truth, according to Freeman, is that defense contractors "getting more money from taxpayers than they ever have save one year" and that “$373 billion in taxpayer money defense contractors received was also more than double what all the troops in our military received in 2011.” Even if defense contractors bore the weight of all of the defense costs, a scenario the author claims is very unlikely, it would still receive more than $300 billion a year, levels comparable to that of 2007 when defense contractors received $333 billion.

Secondly, Freeman argues that even according to Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, a think tank that is one of the most vocal supporters of the defense industry, Department of Defense budget cuts would only reduce actual outlays by five to six percent, far less than numbers claimed. Finally, Freeman claims that the backlog of orders that many defense contractors have means that the industry could be sustained for years and that "the notion that sequestration will bring the defense industry to a screeching halt simply isn’t true."

All this is good news for the cleared job seeker. According to Freeman, while defense budget cuts are a near certainty in the future, it is unlikely that those cuts will have any significant impact on the job market in the near-term. If true, claims of gloom and doom are simply an attempt by defense industry maximize their slice of the federal spending pie and the cuts in defense spending will most likely go unnoticed by job seekers.

Mike Jones is a researcher, writer, and analyst on national and international security. He lives in the DC area.

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Mike Jones is a researcher, writer, and analyst on national and international security. He lives in the DC area.