Washington is battling these days over "sequestration," the $500 billion additional cut to the defense budget looming in January. The White House and Democrats on Capitol Hill insist that intransigent Republicans are risking cuts that no one wants. This is a charade. By his own admission, President Obama has always wanted to cut the defense budget dramatically.

In April 2011—long before the near shutdown of the government and the last-minute debt-ceiling deal, which paved the way for sequestration—the president outlined $400 billion in defense cuts he had already approved. He also said that he wanted to "do that again" and find another $400 billion in military spending reductions. All this without any talk of threats, strategy or requirements—just arbitrary budget targets imposed on the military.

It's clear that Mr. Obama prioritizes sundry domestic spending programs over the defense budget. That budget "is so big," he said last July, "that you can make relatively modest changes to defense that end up giving you a lot of head room to fund things like basic research or student loans or things like that." He added later: "A lot of the spending cuts that we're making should be around areas like defense spending as opposed to food stamps."

Even before sequestration and the possible loss of a half-trillion dollars, the U.S. military has seen three years of budget cuts. The consequences are already here. We have to look all the way back to 1916 to find a year when the Air Force purchased fewer aircraft than are included in Mr. Obama's 2013 budget request.

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... Absent strategic vision and planning from the White House or the Pentagon, aerospace and defense companies aren't waiting to act. They've stopped hiring, halted investing in infrastructure, and begun preemptively consolidating. Research and development is slowing, and mergers and acquisitions are being sidelined, as investors wait for a signal.

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There is a generic hope in Washington that funding will eventually be restored to the national defense. But any fix or delay to sequestration—let alone a rational debate about Defense Department reform—will be complicated by the difficulty of negotiating new debt-ceiling arrangements under the cloud of another possible sovereign debt downgrade.

In testimony before Congress recently, White House budget director Jeffrey Zients suggested that Congress is to blame for defense cuts. But no Republican occupies the seat of commander in chief. Mr. Obama does, and having pledged repeatedly to slice defense, he has done so arbitrarily and without an overarching strategy—before Congress ever got involved. And only Mr. Obama can broker a budget compromise. The military cannot be immune from reform, but it should at least be immune from attack.

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