It's going to be subjective in nature. Just because someone says a contraction is "due to cuts in military spending", doesn't make that the iron-clad "truth" and entirety of the situation. Forgive me for stating the obvious, but energy costs have a ripple effect throughout the economy that is difficult to detect and quantify due to it's breadth and scope.
I really think that economists in general live way too much in the world of dollars and cents, and don't look nearly closely enough at physics, chemistry, and science in general. The main problem here is that the net available energy to our society (and the world at large) is falling due to falling EROEI in our primary source of energy, i.e. petroleum. 50 years ago, it took energy of 1 barrel of oil for every 100 that were extracted. Now, that number is falling below 20 worldwide, and for some sources like oil from shale, the numbers are like 6-13, last I checked.
Abundances of net available energy is at the very core of all economic growth, and conversely, there is economic stagnation if the net availability of energy goes down. And unfortunately there's no realistic substitute for the abundance in NET energy available from fossil fuels. We can do all the things I mentioned in my post above, but it's not going to provide the abundances in net energy we'd need to continue to 'grow' our economy in the manner we've become accustomed to, and developed our expectations around.
Ergo, I believe that overall we are at the beginning of an inexorable world-wide contraction in 'growth'. There may be occasional quarters where things show an upturn here in the early days of the peak, as we're still in the 'bumpy plateau' phase of the curve.
But the era of unending economic growth, fueled by an abundance of cheap energy in the form of easily extracted fossil fuels, is coming to a close, and people are going to need to start adjusting their expectations accordingly.
Chemistry and physics trump 'economics' 
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