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Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqi says the victims in Monday's incident were employees of a company that repairs police vehicles.

U.S. forces' spokesman Jamie Graybeal says the vehicle failed to heed instructions to stop as it came close to the convoy outside of the Afghan capital, Kabul, and the soldiers took "appropriate measures to protect themselves."

He confirms that two individuals were killed and says an assessment is under way.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

A police officer opened fire on U.S. and Afghan forces inside a police headquarters in eastern Afghanistan on Monday, sparking a firefight that killed two U.S. troops and two other Afghan policemen. The attacker was also killed in the shootout, officials said.

The incident in Wardak province was the latest in a series of insider attacks against coalition and Afghan forces that have threatened to undermine their alliance at a time when they need to work increasingly close together in order to hand over responsibility as planned next year.

The attack also comes a day after the expiration of the Afghan president's deadline for U.S. special forces to withdraw from the province following accusations of abuse by those under their command.

U.S. officials have said that they are working with Afghan counterparts on coming up with a solution that will answer President Hamid Karzai's concerns and maintain security in Wardak. The majority of U.S. troops in Wardak are special operations forces.

In Monday's attack, an Afghan police officer stood up in the back of a police pickup truck, grabbed hold of a machine gun and started firing at the U.S. special operations forces and Afghan police in the police compound in Jalrez district, said the province's Deputy Police Chief Abdul Razaq Koraishi.

The assailant killed two Afghan policemen and wounded four, including the district police chief, before he was gunned down, Koraishi said. He did not have a death toll for the U.S. troops.

A coalition military official said two U.S. troops were killed. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to disclose information ahead of a formal statement. A spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Jamie Graybeal, confirmed that a man in an Afghan police uniform turned his weapon on coalition and Afghan forces and that there were injuries, but declined to give further details or confirm any deaths.

Five Afghan police officers were being held for questioning by the Americans, Koraishi said.

Karzai had ordered U.S. special operations forces to leave Wardak province, which lies just outside the capital, Kabul, because of allegations that Afghans working with the commandos were involved in abusive behavior. He gave them two weeks to leave, and the deadline expired at midnight Saturday.

____

Associated Press writer Kimberly Dozier contributed to this report from Kabul, Afghanistan.

Mr. Singh, who was the driver of a bus in which a 23-year-old woman was beaten, raped and attacked with an iron rod, was found hanging from a ceiling grill from a rope made from a bedsheet at 5:45 a.m., jail officials said. A cause of death was not identified, and an investigation is under way, they said.

Family members and his lawyer said Monday that they suspected he was murdered. Mr. Singh's right arm was seriously damaged by a bus accident, and he would have been unable to tie a noose, they said. He shared his cell in the Tihar prison complex with several inmates.

"I suspect there is foul play," said V.K. Anand, the lawyer representing Mr. Singh in the case. "There were no circumstances for committing suicide. His mental state was stable, the trial was going well, he was meeting with his family," he said. "I can't understand why he would commit suicide."

Mr. Singh and his brother Mukesh are two of the five men accused in the case, which is being tried in a special "fast track" court in South Delhi set up for sexual assault charges.

A sixth defendant, a teenager, is being tried as a juvenile. The five adult men face 13 charges, including murder — which could carry the death penalty if they are found guilty — rape and robbery.

Mr. Singh, whose job was to transport schoolchildren around in the bus that later became the scene of the attack, was the first suspect the police found after the attack was reported.

His confession to the police led them to the other accused and helped the police piece together what happened that night.

According to the police charge sheet, the group of drunken men went looking for victims to harass, tricked the young woman and a friend into coming onto the bus, brutally attacked them, stripped off their clothes and left them to die on a highway.

Earlier police confessions are not admissible in court as evidence in India, and Mr. Singh had not yet testified in court. Even without his testimony, the police said they had forensic evidence linking the five men and the juvenile to the woman who was killed and to her male companion, who was also beaten in the attack.

Mr. Singh's brother, who asked that his name not be used to shield him from further news media attention, said by telephone that his brother had shown no suicidal tendencies. Last Friday, Mr. Singh's parents visited him in jail, his brother said, and he appeared calm then.

Mr. Singh's adopted son had visited him last Wednesday, the brother added. "He seemed happy and even made the little boy sit on his lap and talk to him," he said. "He has never said or done anything that indicated that he was contemplating suicide."

Some reports said the pigs had likely been dumped by farmers into the Huangpu River, which slices through the heart of Shanghai. Officials in Shanghai were trying Monday to determine who exactly had dumped the pigs, which were first discovered last Thursday. The numbers increased quickly over the weekend and the total is expected to grow as search barges looking for pigs return to Shanghai.

Shanghai Waterworks, which manages tap water in Shanghai, said Sunday night that the water still meets drinking standards, according to Xinhua, the state news agency. Shanghai officials said the group is now monitoring the water quality by the hour.

A sample of the river water tested positive for porcine circovirus, which officials said can be found in pigs but does not spread to humans, Xinhua reported. "So far, water quality has not been affected, but we have to remove the pigs as quickly as possible and can't let their bodies rot in the water," Xu Rong, director of Shanghai's Songjiang District Environmental Protection Bureau, told Global Times, a state-run newspaper.

Mr. Xu said samples of the dead pigs had been sent to an agricultural commission to determine what killed them. Officials would have answers within three days, he said.

Many Chinese are expressing growing concern over air, soil and water pollution. In recent weeks, several official news organizations have run articles and editorials casting a spotlight on pollution of some of China's major waterways. In one prominent case, a 39-ton chemical spill on Dec. 31 from a fertilizer factory in Shanxi Province affected two other provinces downstream. Local officials had delayed reporting the chemical spill for five days.

A statement issued Monday by the Shanghai government and posted on its Web site said that there were piglets as well as adult animals s weighing hundreds of pounds. Residents in Songjiang District, the area southwest of downtown Shanghai where most of them have been discovered, said this was not the first time they had seen dead pigs in the Huangpu River. But this time, the number was higher than in the past, according to the city government's statement.

A preliminary inquiry has found that the dead pigs originated in Zhejiang Province, which is south of Shanghai and upstream on the Huangpu River.

Songjiang District officials said they were gathering all the dead pigs in one place to safely dispose of them, Xinhua reported. Officials are trying to track the source of the pigs from marks on their ears.

Photographs of the carcasses floating in the river have circulated widely on the Internet. One photograph on the Web site of Global Times showed sanitation workers in orange vests and blue uniforms lifting carcasses from Hengliaojing Creek with long wooden poles.

The accompanying report, citing a Shanghai news Web site, said the first batch was discovered Thursday in Hengliaojing Creek, near a local water treatment plant in an area that is a protected water resource.

Officials began sending out barges on Saturday to collect the carcasses. Global Times said 12 boats are now involved in the recovery efforts.

Just down Route 4, at the New York border, the landscape abruptly turns from spiffy to scruffy. Washington County, N.Y., which is home to about 60,000 people — just as Rutland is — saw only a quarter as much money.

"We didn't receive a lot," said Peter Aust, the president of the local chamber of commerce on the New York side. "We never saw any of the positive impact of the stimulus funds."

Vermont's 625,000 residents have two United States senators, and so do New York's 19 million. That means that a Vermonter has 30 times the voting power in the Senate of a New Yorker just over the state line — the biggest inequality between two adjacent states. The nation's largest gap, between Wyoming and California, is more than double that.

The difference in the fortunes of Rutland and Washington Counties reflects the growing disparity in their citizens' voting power, and it is not an anomaly. The Constitution has always given residents of states with small populations a lift, but the size and importance of the gap has grown markedly in recent decades, in ways the framers probably never anticipated. It affects the political dynamic of issues as varied as gun control, immigration and campaign finance.

In response, lawmakers, lawyers and watchdog groups have begun pushing for change. A lawsuit to curb the small-state advantage in the Senate's rules is moving through the courts. The Senate has already made modest changes to rules concerning the filibuster, which has particularly benefited senators from small states. And eight states and the District of Columbia have endorsed a proposal to reduce the chances that the small-state advantage in the Electoral College will allow a loser of the popular vote to win the presidency.

To be sure, some scholars and members of Congress view the small-state advantage as a vital part of the constitutional structure and say the growth of that advantage is no cause for worry. Others say it is an authentic but insoluble problem.

What is certain is that the power of the smaller states is large and growing. Political scientists call it a striking exception to the democratic principle of "one person, one vote." Indeed, they say, the Senate may be the least democratic legislative chamber in any developed nation.

Behind the growth of the advantage is an increase in population gap between large and small states, with large states adding many more people than small ones in the last half-century. There is a widening demographic split, too, with the larger states becoming more urban and liberal, and the smaller ones remaining rural and conservative, which lends a new significance to the disparity in their political power.

The threat of the filibuster in the Senate, which has become far more common than in past decades, plays a role, too. Research by two political scientists, Lauren C. Bell and L. Marvin Overby, has found that small-state senators, often in leadership positions, have amplified their power by using the filibuster more often than their large-state counterparts.

Beyond influencing government spending, these shifts generally benefit conservative causes and hurt liberal ones. When small states block or shape legislation backed by senators representing a majority of Americans, most of the senators on the winning side tend to be Republicans, because Republicans disproportionately live in small states and Democrats, especially African-Americans and Latinos, are more likely to live in large states like California, New York, Florida and Illinois. Among the nation's five smallest states, only Vermont tilts liberal, while Alaska, Wyoming and the Dakotas have each voted Republican in every presidential election since 1968.

Recent bills to overhaul the immigration system and increase disclosure of campaign spending have won the support of senators representing a majority of the population but have not yet passed. A sweeping climate bill, meant to raise the cost of carbon emissions, passed the House, where seats are allocated by population, but not the Senate.

Each of those bills is a major Democratic Party priority. Throughout his second term, President Obama is likely to be lining up with a majority of large-state Congress members on his biggest goals and against a majority of small-state lawmakers.

It is easiest to measure the small-state advantage in dollars. Over the past few years, as the federal government has spent hundreds of billions to respond to the financial crisis, it has done much more to assist the residents of small states than large ones. The top five per capita recipients of federal stimulus grants were states so small that they have only a single House member.

"From highway bills to homeland security," said Sarah A. Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University, "small states make out like bandits."

Here in Rutland, the federal government has spent $2,500 per person since early 2009, compared with $600 per person across the state border in Washington County.

As the money started arriving, Senator Bernard Sanders, the Vermont independent, took credit for having delivered a "hefty share of the national funding." Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, vowed to fight for her state's "fair share."

As a matter of constitutional design, small states have punched above their weight politically for as long as the United States has existed. The founding of the country depended in part on the Great Compromise, which created a legislative chamber — the Senate — in which every state had the same political voice, regardless of population. The advantage small states enjoy in the Senate is echoed in the Electoral College, where each state is allocated votes not only for its House members (reflecting the state's population) but also for its senators (a two-vote bonus).

No one expects the small-state advantage to disappear, given its constitutional roots. But its growing importance has caused some large-state policy makers and advocates for giving all citizens an equal voice in democracy to begin exploring ways to counteract it. Those pushing for change tend to be Democrats.

One plan, enacted into law by eight states and the District of Columbia, would effectively cancel the small states' Electoral College edge. The nine jurisdictions have pledged to allocate their 132 electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote — if they can persuade states with 138 more votes to make the same commitment. (That would represent the bare majority of the 538 electoral votes needed for a presidential candidate to prevail.)

The states that have agreed to the arrangement range in size from Vermont to California, and they are dominated by Democrats. But support for changing the Electoral College cuts across party lines. In a recent Gallup Poll, 61 percent of Republicans, 63 percent of independents and 66 percent of Democrats said they favored abolishing the system and awarding the presidency to the winner of the popular vote.

In 2000, had electoral votes been allocated by population, without the two-vote bonuses, Al Gore would have prevailed over George W. Bush. Alexander Keyssar, a historian of democracy at Harvard, said he would not be surprised if another Republican candidate won the presidency while losing the popular vote in coming decades, given the structure of the Electoral College.

Critics of the outsize power of small states have also turned to the courts. In December, four House members and the advocacy group Common Cause filed an appeal in a lawsuit challenging the Senate's filibuster rule on the ground that it "upsets the balance in the Great Compromise" that created the Senate.

The filibuster "has significantly increased the underrepresentation of people living in the most populous states," the suit said. But for the rule, it said, the Dream Act, which would have given some immigrants who arrived illegally as children a path to legalization, and the Disclose Act, requiring greater reporting of political spending, would be law.

A federal judge in Washington dismissed the suit, saying he was "powerless to address" what he acknowledged was an "important and controversial issue." The judge instead sided with lawyers for the Senate, who said that the challengers lacked standing to sue and that the courts lacked power to rule on the internal workings of another branch of the government.

However these individual efforts fare, the basic disparity between large and small states is wired into the constitutional framework. Some scholars say that this is as it should be and that the advantages enjoyed by small states are necessary to prevent them from becoming a voiceless minority.

"Without it, wealth and power would tend to flow to the prosperous coasts and cities and away from less-populated rural areas," said Stephen Macedo, a political scientist at Princeton.

Gary L. Gregg II, a political scientist who holds the Mitch McConnell Chair in Leadership at the University of Louisville, similarly argued that urban areas already have enough power, as the home of most major government agencies, news media organizations, companies and universities. "A simple, direct democracy will centralize all power," he wrote recently, "in urban areas to the detriment of the rest of the nation."

Others say the country needs to make changes to preserve its democratic vitality. They have called for an overhaul of the Constitution, as far-fetched an idea as that may be.

"The Senate constitutes a threat to the vitality of the American political system in the 21st century," said Sanford Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas, "and it warrants a constitutional convention to rectify it."

Frances E. Lee, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, said the problem was as real as the solution elusive, adding that she and other scholars have tried without success to find a contemporary reason to exempt the Senate from the usual rules of granting citizens an equal voice in their government. "I can't think of any way to justify it based on democratic principles," Professor Lee said.

The Biggest Gap of All

Fresno, Calif., is a city of a half-million people with a long list of problems, including 14 percent unemployment, the aftermath of a foreclosure crisis, homeless encampments that dot the sun-blasted landscape and worries about the safety of the surrounding county's drinking water.

A thousand miles away, a roughly comparable number of people inhabit the entire state of Wyoming. Like Fresno and its environs, Wyoming is rural, with an economy largely based on agriculture. It is also in much better shape than Fresno, with an unemployment rate around 5 percent.

Even so, Wyoming receives far more assistance from the federal government than Fresno does. The half-million residents of Wyoming also have much more sway over federal policy than the half-million residents of Fresno. The vote people in Fresno remember best was taken in 2007, when an immigration overhaul bill that included a guest worker program failed in the Senate. Both agricultural businesses and leaders of Fresno's large Hispanic population supported the bill, much as polls suggested a majority of Americans did.

But the immigration bill died in the Senate after a 53-46 vote rejecting a bid to move the bill forward to final passage. Wyoming's two senators were in the majority and California's two senators on the losing side.

Had the votes been allocated by population, the result would have been lopsided in the other direction, with 57 votes in favor and 43 against.

Even 57 votes would not have been enough to overcome a filibuster, which requires 60. In the last few years, 41 senators representing as little as a third of the nation's population have frequently blocked legislation, as the filibuster (or the threat of it) has become a routine part of Senate business.

Beyond the filibuster, senators from Wyoming and other small states regularly oppose and often thwart programs popular in states with vastly bigger populations. The 38 million people who live in the nation's 22 smallest states, including Wyoming, are represented by 44 senators. The 38 million residents of California are represented by two senators.

In one of every 10 especially consequential votes in the Senate over the two decades ending in 2010, as chosen by Congressional Quarterly, the winning side would have lost had voting been allocated by population. And in 24 of the 27 such votes, the majority of the senators on the winning side were Republicans.

David Mayhew, a political scientist at Yale, cautioned that the political benefit to Republicans is "quite small as well as quite stable," adding that it is important not to lose sight of small blue states like Delaware, Hawaii, Rhode Island and Vermont. But he acknowledged that small states of both political stripes receive disproportionate federal benefits. Professor Lee, an author of "Sizing Up the Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation," argues that the partisan impact of the small-state advantage is larger. "There is a Republican tilt in the Senate," she said.

"The way Republicans are distributed across the nation is more efficient," she added, referring to the more even allocation of Republican voters, allowing them to form majorities in small-population states. Democrats are more tightly clustered, especially in large metropolitan areas.

Born of a Compromise

Equal representation of the states in the Senate is a consequence of the Great Compromise, the 1787 deal that resolved a seemingly intractable dispute between the smaller states and a handful of large ones like Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia. But the country was very different then. The population was about four million, and the maximum disparity in voting power between states was perhaps 11 to 1. It is now six times greater than that. Even scholars who criticize how voting power is allocated in the Senate agree that parts of its design play an important role in the constitutional structure. With its longer terms and fewer members, the Senate can, in theory, be more collegial, take the long view and be insulated from passing passions.

But those qualities do not depend on unequal representation among people who live in different states. The current allocation of power in the Senate, many legal scholars and political scientists say, does not protect minorities with distinctive characteristics, much less disadvantaged ones.

To the contrary, the disproportionate voting power of small states is a sort of happenstance that has on occasion left a stain on the nation's history.

Robert A. Dahl, the Yale political scientist, who is 97 and has been studying American government for more than 70 years, has argued that slavery survived thanks to the disproportionate influence of small-population Southern states. The House passed eight antislavery measures between 1800 and 1860; all died in the Senate. The civil rights movement of the mid-20th century, he added, was slowed by senators representing small-population states.

As the population of the United States has grown a hundredfold since the founding, to more than 310 million, the Supreme Court has swept away most instances of unequal representation beyond the Senate. In a series of seminal cases in the 1960s, the court forbade states to give small-population counties or districts a larger voice than ones with more people, in both state legislatures and the House.

"The conception of political equality from the Declaration of Independence, to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, to the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Amendments can mean only one thing — one person, one vote," Justice William O. Douglas wrote for the court in 1963, referring to the amendments that extended the franchise to blacks and women and required the popular election of the Senate.

The rulings revolutionized American politics — everywhere but in the Senate, which the Constitution protected from change and where the disparities in voting power have instead become more extreme.

A Barrier to Change

In his memoirs, Chief Justice Earl Warren described the cases from the 1960s establishing the equality of each citizen's vote as the most important achievement of the court he led for 16 years. That made them more important in his view than Brown v. Board of Education, which ordered the desegregation of public schools, and Gideon v. Wainwright, which guaranteed lawyers for poor people accused of serious crimes.

"Legislators represent people, not trees or acres," Chief Justice Warren wrote for the court in 1964, rejecting the argument that state senators, like federal ones, could represent geographic areas with varying populations. "Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests."

Applying that principle to the Senate would be very hard. Even an ordinary constitutional amendment would not do the trick, as the framers of the Constitution went out of their way to require states to agree before their power is diminished. Article V of the Constitution sets out the procedure for amendments and requires a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress or action by two-thirds of state legislatures to get things started. But the article makes an exception for the Senate. "No state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate," the article concludes.

The United States Senate is hardly the only legislature that does not stick strictly to the principle of equal representation. Political scientists use the term "malapportioned" to describe the phenomenon, and it is common around the world.

But the Senate is in contention for the least democratic legislative chamber. In some other countries with federal systems, in which states or provinces have independent political power, a malapportioned upper house may have only a weak or advisory role. In the United States, the Senate is at least equal in power to the House, and it possesses some distinctive responsibilities, like treaty ratification and the approval of presidential appointments. A recent appeals court decision severely limiting the president's power to make recess appointments, if it stands, will further increase the Senate's power.

Professor Dahl has calculated the difference between the local government unit with the most voting power and that with the least. The smallest ratio, 1.5, was in Austria, while in Belgium, Spain, India, Germany, Australia and Canada the ratio was never higher than 21 to 1.

In this country, the ratio between Wyoming's representation and California's is 66 to 1. By that measure, Professor Dahl found, only Brazil, Argentina and Russia had less democratic chambers. A separate analysis, by David Samuels and Richard Snyder, similarly found that geographically large countries with federal systems tend to overrepresent sparsely populated areas.

This pattern has policy consequences, notably ones concerning the environment. "Nations with malapportioned political systems have lower gasoline taxes (and lower pump prices) than nations with more equitable representation of urban constituencies," two political scientists, J. Lawrence Broz and Daniel Maliniak, wrote in a recent study. Such countries also took longer to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, if they ratified it at all. These differences were, they wrote, a consequence of the fact that "rural voters in industrialized countries rely more heavily on fossil fuels than urban voters."

In 2009, the House of Representatives narrowly approved a bill to address climate change, but only after months of horse-trading that granted concessions and money to rural states. That was an example, Mr. Broz and Mr. Maliniak said, of compensating rural residents for the burdens of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

But it was not enough. The bill died in the Senate.

"The conditions appealed against are unwarranted and not substantiated by the facts," said the appeal, which was filed Friday in Pretoria, the South African capital.

The appeal reflected the robust defense strategy of lawyers for Pistorius, who has been staying at his uncle Arnold's home in a Pretoria suburb since he was released on bail on Feb. 22.

It is a delicate balance because the Pistorius family has also sought to keep a low profile, expressing sorrow for the death of Reeva Steenkamp on Feb. 14. Pistorius says he mistakenly shot Steenkamp, thinking she was an intruder in his home. Prosecutors believe he killed her intentionally after an argument.

The Associated Press received a copy of the court papers by email from representatives of the Pistorius family. The appeal was prepared by Ramsay Webber, a legal firm based in Johannesburg.

In the papers, lawyers for the double-amputee athlete argued against the requirement that he surrender all passports and travel documents, and refrain from applying for such documents pending the end of his case.

The lawyers said evidence presented at the athlete's bail hearing showed he is not a flight risk and should have the option of traveling outside South Africa as long as he has official permission.

The appeal also said there was "no basis in fact or in law" justifying terms under which Pistorius must be supervised by a probation officer and a correctional official.

Officials will visit Pistorius at his uncle's home at least four times a month, according to James Smalberger, chief deputy commissioner of the department of correctional services, who spoke to The Associated Press last month.

"He's not under house arrest, but his movements need to be known to us so that we don't pitch there and he's not there," Smalberger had said. "We agree on 'free time' normally during the course of the day, and in the evening we expect him to be home."

The appeal against the bail conditions also objected to the requirement that Pistorius refrain from using alcohol or any banned substance, even though he had no intention of doing so.

"The mere use of any substance with alcohol in it will give rise to a transgression of the wide condition imposed," the appeal said.

In addition, the runner should be allowed access to the property at Silverwoods Country Estate where he shot Steenkamp, once the state completes its investigations there within a "reasonable time limit," according to Pistorius' legal camp.

"A blanket restriction on speaking to residents is unfair" and infringes on Pistorius' rights to consult people on the estate to prepare for his trial, the appeal said.

Chief Magistrate Desmond Nair had set bail at 1 million rand ($113,000). The 26-year-old track star was also ordered to turn in any guns he owns, and cannot leave the district of Pretoria without his probation officer's permission.

On the list are not only base closings but also an additional reduction in deployed nuclear weapons and stockpiles and a restructuring of the military medical insurance program that costs more than America spends on all of its diplomacy and foreign aid around the world. Also being considered is yet another scaling back in next-generation warplanes, starting with the F-35, the most expensive weapons program in United States history.

None of those programs would go away. But inside the Pentagon, even some senior officers are saying that the reductions, if done smartly, could easily exceed those mandated by sequestration, as the cuts are called, and leave room for the areas where the administration believes more money will be required.

These include building drones, developing offensive and defensive cyberweapons and focusing on Special Operations forces.

Publicly, at least, Mr. Obama has not backed any of those cuts, even though he has deplored the "dumb" approach of simply cutting every program in the military equally.

Mr. Obama will visit Capitol Hill on Tuesday in another attempt to persuade lawmakers to reach a long-term deficit-reduction deal and replace the indiscriminate cuts with more targeted ones.

Still, Pentagon officials are starting to examine targeted ways to cut their budget. "What we've learned in the past year is that the politics of dumb cuts is easy, because no one has to think through the implications of slicing everything by 8 percent," said one senior defense official who has been deeply involved in the planning process. "The politics of cutting individual programs is as hard as it's always been."

When Mr. Obama took office four years ago, with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars raging, deep cuts in the defense budget seemed unthinkable. He forced the Pentagon to cut nearly $50 billion a year, which was regarded by many as huge.

But today, deficit hawks outnumber defense hawks on Capitol Hill, and the possibility of $100 billion or more in additional annual cuts does not seem outrageous — if only agreement were possible on which programs should shrink fastest.

Last week, a group of five former deputy defense secretaries — essentially the Pentagon's chief operating officers — called for a "bottom up" review that reassesses the need for each major program and weapons system, saying this was an opportunity to accomplish cuts that have long been delayed, after a decade in which the American national security budget has nearly doubled.

In their more candid moments — almost always when speaking with a guarantee of anonymity — the Pentagon's top civilian and military leaders acknowledge that the painful sequestration process may ultimately prove beneficial if it forces the Defense Department and Congress to reconsider the cost of cold-war-era systems that are still in inventory despite the many changes made to the military in the last 10 years.

"Sequester is an ugly experience, but it could grow up to be a budget discipline swan," said Gordon Adams, a former senior budget official in the Clinton administration who is now at the Stimson Center, which studies defense issues. "It could provide the planning discipline the services and the building have been missing since 2001."

The central challenge facing the Pentagon and the White House, Mr. Adams and several current senior officials said, is this: All the big, immediate budget benefits come from reducing the size of active-duty forces. By contrast, cutting new weapons systems and bases and reducing health care costs can save large amounts 5 to 10 years out, but it does little in the short term.

Mr. Obama took a step in that direction in 2011, when he rejected a Pentagon request for a permanent standing force of 100,000 or so troops for future "contingency operations" like those in Iraq and Afghanistan. "That's not the way we are going to go," he told his staff after the request was received.

The message quickly got back to the Pentagon that Mr. Obama had no interest in repeating the kind of lengthy interventions that have consumed more than $3 trillion since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

But the Pentagon's subsequent agreement to cut $500 billion in planned spending over a decade turns out to have been just a start, and military officials are now abandoning the phrase that they will have to "do more with less" and starting to assess what it would mean to just do less.

Toward that end, officials say that Ashton B. Carter, the deputy defense secretary, plans to convene a panel of experts to conduct a crash review of the current national military strategy with an eye to reshaping it to fit the new budget constraints.

Mr. Carter, whom the White House asked to remain under the new defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, has already cut the budget for information technology, to force the Pentagon to find cheaper ways to provide it, officials say.

But the next set of cuts will be much harder, because they involve huge constituencies — in Congressional districts, inside the military services and among veterans' groups.

"The problem is that the biggest, most-needed cuts are in programs that also have the broadest set of defenders," said Maren Leed, the director of the defense policy studies group at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and a former top aide to Gen. Ray Odierno, now the Army's chief of staff.

The most obvious examples of those problems come in base closings and higher co-payments or premiums for the beneficiaries of Tricare, the military's sprawling health care program, which costs upward of $51 billion a year. To take the politics out of base closings, Congress in the past has established a commission to identify underused facilities, creating a list that it could either vote up or down on but could not amend.

But with many of the targeted bases now fairly obvious to members of Congress, they are reluctant even to establish a new commission. Similarly, Congress turned back a modest administration effort to revamp Tricare. "There's not a single district without a lot of beneficiaries of the system," Ms. Leed said.

Cuts in the nuclear arsenal face a different political imperative. Mr. Obama has been sitting for months on a proposal, agreed to by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that could trim the number of active nuclear weapons in America's arsenal by nearly a third and make big cuts in the stockpile of backup weapons. But he has not signed off on it.

Rather than act unilaterally, the administration is hoping it can negotiate similar cuts with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — and do it without a treaty that would surely set off another battle with defense hawks in the Senate. But that prospect is doubtful, senior officials say.

Even if Mr. Obama wins his strategic argument that the arsenal is far too large for America's future defense needs, it is not clear how big the savings would be. The easiest weapons to cut — those based in silos in the middle of the country — are also the cheapest to keep in the field.

The most expensive nuclear weapons to operate are carried aboard submarines; they are also the most invulnerable to attack, and thus Pentagon and White House strategists want to preserve them the longest.

Moreover, operating a production base for nuclear weapons, the Defense Department's insurance policy in case the country ever needed to produce more, is very costly — though the administration is looking for ways to cut an $80 billion commitment to remake America's nuclear laboratories.

The biggest target of all is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a new jet for the Navy, the Air Force and the Marines, and the largest single line item in the Pentagon's budget. Between $55 billion and $84 billion has already been spent, but the estimates of final production costs run close to $400 billion.

The Marine Corps says it has no choice but to go forward with its version of the plane, because its current aircraft are obsolete, and the Air Force wants to replace aging F-16s with the new, stealthy plane.

But the program was wildly mismanaged during the Bush administration — "The Joint Strike Fighter program has been both a scandal and a tragedy," Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said in December 2011 — and now that the number of planes scheduled for production has already been slashed, the per-plane cost has risen to well over $1 billion.

The handling of the production by Lockheed Martin, and the huge changes demanded by each of the services, has made the plane an easy target for critics.

But Lockheed has spread production over nearly every state in the union, in order to keep Congressional support high: as soon as the discussion veers toward strategic needs, Lockheed begins to stress the jobs at risk if the program were cut or canceled.