The White House is poised to send Congress a report on how so-called sequestration budget cuts would be implemented, a document the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer implied yesterday will not include minute levels of detail.

Congressional aides said today is the deadline for President Barack Obama to send Congress an explanation of how $1.2 trillion in defense and non-defense “sequestration” reductions would be applied if lawmakers can’t agree on a plan to stop the decade-long cuts from starting next year. The politically unpopular cuts, of $500 billion to the Pentagon, are intended to trim the same percentage from every applicable defense program, project, and activity. The imminent Office of Management and Budget (OMB) report is required by the Sequestration Transparency Act of 2012, which Obama signed into law Aug. 7.

Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Frank Kendall said at a Washington conference yesterday that not much planning can be done for the sequestration cuts, which he estimates would indiscriminately slice 11 percent off of each applicable part of the Pentagon budget. Some defense funding, including military personnel, is exempt from sequestration.

“The way sequestration works is (that under it) planning is kind of irrelevant,” Kendall told the ComDef 2012 conference at the National Press Club. “You don’t have much choice. There’s no flexibility in the law.”

He said if the sequestration cuts kick in, officials would look at 2,500 lines in the defense budget and “go cut each of them the same.”

“That’s the plan,” he said. “It’s 2,500 lines, take about 11 percent out of each one.”

Kendall said his message to people who work on weapon systems is: “If you want to know what will happen to your program, go look at how much money you expect to have in your budget next year, deduct 11 percent.”

The sequestration cuts were triggered by the Budget Control Act of 2011, which said if a bipartisan “super committee” of lawmakers couldn’t agree on a plan to cut the federal deficit by $1.2 trillion then the politically unpopular reductions would start next January. The committee failed and congressional Democrats and Republicans now are fighting over an alternative plan to prevent the sequestration cuts from actually starting.

Kendall said while the Budget Control Act is “very simple,” an older law from 1985 that first established the sequestration process is “very complicated.” “And so we’ve trying to figure out what it implies,” Kendall said about the older Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act.

Those implications, he said, include that war funding–in the so-called Overseas Contingency Funding budget–as well as current-year unobligated funding would be included in the sequestration cuts. And all fiscal year 2013 funding would be cut, even though sequestration wouldn’t kick in until January, three months after the fiscal year starts.

“So even if you put money on contract in (FY) ’13…we have to go back and figure out a way to get a net of about 11 percent out of those lines as well,” he said.

Republican lawmakers and defense-industry advocates have been lambasting the White House and Pentagon for not releasing a detailed report on how the sequestration cuts would be implemented. Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta both oppose sequestration and have called on Congress to agree on an alternate budget-cutting plan.

“We haven’t done a detailed plan…in part because there’s not all that much planning to be done,” Kendall said yesterday.

Still, he said Pentagon officials “have looked at a few samples of programs and different areas” of the defense budget, and found the impact of sequestration “varies from being relatively easy to absorb, where you’re essentially doing a level of effort that’s a little bit lower, to something that’s fairly significant in its impact on contracts like multiyear (deals), for example, that are already in place.”

He added: “So if we get to the point where we have to do that in more detail we will, (but) we’re counting on Congress to avoid this.”

Kendall vented that the sequestration process “doesn’t allow us to prioritize.”

“It doesn’t allow us to find the things that are least important to us,” he said. “It doesn’t allow us to avoid some of the damage that will be done by this kind of a mechanism.”

Kendall, in response to a question, hypothesized about what would happen if Congress replaces the sequestration cuts to the defense budget with reductions of the same size that are not across-the-board and could be controlled by Pentagon officials.

He said there likely would be a gradual drawdown of military force structure, and then additional cost-saving reductions would likely come from procurement and research and development (R&D) accounts.

“I would suspect that there would be a mix of things, ranging from reducing production levels, to slowing down R&D and maybe some cuts, kills of programs as well,” he said, adding: “We’ve taken out a lot of major programs already, we kind of took out the non-essential major starts or major programs over the last few years. There really aren’t many left to go after there, frankly.”

Kendall said sequestration would make “irrelevant” much of the work he and Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter have done to improve the efficiency of the acquisition system.

Apart from the sequestration discussion, Kendall said he plans to roll out a new version of the Better Buying Power initiative that differs from the acquisition-cost-saving effort Carter launched two years ago when he held Kendall’s position.

“We’ve learned from the experience of the last couple of years about (how) some of those things worked very well, some of them have not turned out to be all that productive, others have been difficult to implement and we have more work to do,” he said. “New things have come up over the course.”

Some aspects of the initial Better Buying Power effort will remain, Kendall said. Those include efforts to control cost growth, emphasize industry competition, support innovation, and remove ineffective bureaucracy including some export controls on U.S. defense products.

Kendall told the industry crowd he does not foresee a major consolidation of the defense industry prime contractors, akin to what happened in the early 1990s.

“We’ve contracted there (with prime contractors) just about as much as makes sense to us,” he said. “We have to preserve competition at that level.”