How will the military be affected by sequester cuts?
(CBS News) PENTAGON - Sunday is the second full day of the across-the-board spending cuts known as the sequester.
About $85 billion in federal spending will be cut this year, $46 billion of which comes from defense.
The defense cuts start small, very small. No more Air Force flyovers at funerals and graduations.
Sequester's automatic cuts to hit military school districts first
Complete Coverage: The Sequester
Boehner: No one tried harder than me to avert sequester
A "new standard" of compromise ahead for Congress?
The Navy delayed the deployment of the hospital ship Comfort to South America, but one of its newest warships left for the western Pacific right on schedule.
By April 1, however, the Navy will shut down an entire carrier air wing and the Army will stop bringing in equipment for major overhauls. The longer the budget cuts last, the greater the kind of damage Sen. John McCain, R.-Ariz., warned about on CBS News' "Face the Nation."
"If you deprive the military of the ability to train, the ability to have flight hours for our pilots and air crews, the ability of our people to have the right kind of equipment to fight with, then you are putting us in danger in my view," McCain said.
With military pay and support to the troops in Afghanistan off limits, the rest of the Defense Department must absorb $43 billion in cuts -- an across-the-board 9-percent reduction to every program. A bad situation, but after meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Friday, the new Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel vowed to make the best of it.
"We will manage these issues," he said. "These are adjustments. We anticipated these kinds of realities and we will do what we need to do to assure the capabilities of our forces."
Hagel could get some relief as early as this week if Congress passes a defense spending bill that, among other things, would allow the Navy to go ahead with the planned overhaul of two aircraft carriers.
