Chuck Hagel took over as the US defence secretary on Wednesday after a painful, prolonged and divisive nomination battle in the Senate that finally ended on Tuesday.
He scraped together enough support to win Senate confirmation by a 58 to 41 vote. Until the very end, he had to overcome fierce opposition from pro-Israel groups and a filibuster led by fellow Republicans who neither forgot nor forgave his withering criticism of the George W Bush administration’s handling of the war in Iraq.
He will have to confront an even tougher challenge: slashing $46 billion in military spending, about 9 percent of the defence budget, by the end of September.
Hagel, a former two-term senator from Nebraska, will be forced to make some snap decisions about which military programmes to preserve and which to sacrifice. Already, defence officials have said they may have to furlough up to 800,000 civilians, drastically scale back training and keep ships in port, including an aircraft carrier strike group that was bound for the Persian Gulf.
In a statement after the vote, Hagel said he was honoured and promised to “work closely with Congress to ensure that we maintain the strongest military in the world”.
Pentagon officials already had to face questions about whether their new boss was a wounded duck.
Thomas Donnelly, a defence and security analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, predicted that Hagel would wield minimal clout. He said the Obama administration dictated national-security policy from the White House and had marginalised the secretary of defence into a “ceremonial” job.
“It’s a slight exaggeration to say that,” Donnelly said. “It should be an important job. But if the White House is calling all the shots, there’s not much left for the secretary to do.”