Businesses of all sizes expect to take a hit if Washington doesn’t fix the automatic spending cuts set to hit the Defense Department in 2013 as part of the “fiscal cliff.” A new report finds that sequestration threatens over 100,000 civilian Defense Department jobs. CQ reports on the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment's study:

The nonpartisan Washington think tank released an analysis that found that should Congress fail to avert a budget sequester, mandated in the deficit-reduction law (PL 112-25), the civilian workforce of about 791,000 would absorb a 10.3 percent reduction over the entire fiscal year.

But because the cuts would occur three months into the new fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, the actual reduction required would be 13.7 percent, or 108,367 full-time slots.

“And the longer DoD waits to reduce its civilian workforce once sequester goes into effect, the deeper it will have to cut civilians for the remainder of the fiscal year,” said CSBA military spending analyst Todd Harrison.

Jobs with defense companies are also expected to be hit. Last year, George Mason University economist Stephen Fuller produced a study estimating that over 1 million jobs would be lost, and companies like Lockheed-Martin have publicly said that tens of thousands of workers could be laid off because of the automatic cuts.

Unless Washington fixes these cuts that were done with a chainsaw and never intended to take place, the civilian workforce will take a hard punch along with the ability of our economy to produce an adequate defense.