The failure of the “supercommittee” to reach a deficit agreement is supposed to trigger $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts in federal spending over the next decade, nearly $500 billion of that from the basic Pentagon budget/…/ Besides the nearly $500 billion in cuts that are supposed to start in January 2013, the budget act that created the supercommittee mandated an initial cut of roughly $450 billion in defense spending, spread over the next decade. According to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, that would put basic defense spending for 2013 around $472 billion — about the same, in inflation-adjusted terms, as what was spent in 2007.