“I know Congress is locked in partisan gridlock,” Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said on Monday, adding, “They can’t figure out what the hell they’re going to do to try to deal with this issue.”

He was talking in Monterey, Calif., in his old congressional district, about the sequestration threat and the possibility that the defense budget — in which planned Pentagon spending over the next 10 years already has been reduced by $487 billion — will be hit with an additional $500 billion across-the-board cut if Congress does not produce a debt-reduction plan this year.

What Panetta didn’t mention is the Defense Department’s problems managing the huge sums of money it has received during a decade of warfare, when hundreds of billions of dollars overwhelmed its ability to oversee outlays.