With the election over, most of the attention on Washington has returned to the looming “fiscal cliff” and the potential broad-stroke cuts to government programs, with particularly large cuts targeting the Department of Defense. MDM spoke with distributors and manufacturers about the impact of defense and other government spending cuts on business and how they have responded to the shifts that have already occurred.

In 2011, a congressional super-committee failed to come up with a plan to cut $1.2 trillion from the U.S. budget. As a result, a slate of across-the-board cuts was put into motion, automatically slashing ...