Ryan: Obama should 'put up or shut up' on defense sequestration

During a defense roundtable Thursday in Fayetteville, N.C., Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan said that President Obama needed to detail how sequestration cuts to the defense budget would affect military and contractor jobs and budgets before Election Day.

"Put up or shut up," Ryan said. "The president needs to show us how this is going to be put into place."

The Wisconsin lawmaker pledged that under a Romney administration, the looming half-trillion in cuts to the Pentagon budget "will not happen."

"We believe in the doctrine of peace through strength. Strength means have a strong national defense," Ryan said.

Democrats have agreed, saying they too want to avoid the dramatic cuts to the defense budget. But President Obama has argued Republicans were the ones who pushed for automatic cuts in exchange for raising the debt-ceiling limit, and said Republicans need to agree to tax increases on the wealthiest Americans.

"The only thing that's standing in the way of us solving this problem right now is the unwillingness of some members of Congress to ask people like me — people who've done very well, millionaires, billionaires — to pay a little bit more, in part, to preserve the freedoms that we hold dear," the president told the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot in an interview Monday.

The president added that "Democrats have to understand we're going to need some additional spending cuts, and Republicans have to understand we're going to need some additional revenues."

And the Obama campaign issued a statement Thursday blaming House Republicans, including Ryan, for the looming cuts.

“If Congressman Ryan were serious about avoiding the automatic defense cuts he decried in North Carolina today, he’d tell Mitt Romney and his fellow Republicans in Congress to work with the President to achieve balanced deficit reduction that includes asking millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share – as the plan President Obama has put forward does," said Obama spokesman Danny Kanner. "But he’s not. In fact, Congressman Ryan voted for the agreement he criticized today, and he walked away from a balanced deficit reduction plan last summer because he thought it would help the President’s re-election prospects."

But on Thursday, Ryan argued the president was ignoring the personal costs generated by the uncertainty to those who work with or for the military.

"When we think about this issue — our national defense — it's not just some theoretical thing, it's personal to people," Ryan said.

Both campaigns have been working to bracket the issue in recent days. Ryan hit Obama on the cuts during a stop Tuesday at a helicopter museum in Pennsylvania, while the president scheduled interviews with local swing-state media outlets Monday to push Republicans to agree on tax increases.

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