Supercommittee failure sends Republicans scrambling to beat defense cuts

The failure of the bipartisan congressional "supercommittee's" announcement on Monday that it had failed to reach an agreement on $1.2 trillion in deficit cuts, has set off the trigger mechanism on a budget bomb that would land up at the defence department's door cutting spends from 2013.

The full Congress now has a year to devise an offsetting cut scheme, to keep the president's backup plan, mandated by law, from taking effect which also includes an equal amounts of cuts in domestic spending.

Soon after the supercomittee's failure, top Republicans on the armed services committees said they would seek to undo automatic defence cuts they voted for as part of the August debt limit deal.

Representative Buck McKeon,a Republican from California, said he would introduce a bill soon to prevent catastrophic damage to national security.

He said the US army had already contributed nearly half a trillion to deficit reduction and now had nothing more to give.

Senator John McCain Republican, Arizona, said he would "pursue all options" to beat the defence cuts.