Defence Secretary Leon Panetta vowed on Friday to keep the US military the “strongest” in the world despite budget pressures, after being sworn in as the new Pentagon chief.
“As your leader, I will ensure that our nation continues to have the best-trained, best-equipped, and strongest military in the world – a force prepared to confront the challenges that face us,” Panetta wrote in his first message to troops after taking the oath of office at the Pentagon.
“While tough budget choices will need to be made, I do not believe in the false choice between fiscal discipline and a strong national defense. We will all work together to achieve both,” Panetta said in a message distributed by the Pentagon.
The outgoing CIA director said it had been “one hell of a ride” leading the spy agency and called the killing of al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden a highlight of his tenure.
In a final message to CIA employees titled “arrivederci”, the son of Italian immigrants praised “America’s silent warriors” at the agency and described what he called the peaks and valleys of his more than two year tenure.
“Emotionally, this job took me to both the depths and heights: from hearing we had lost seven of our own at Khost (in eastern Afghanistan), to the moment that sealed one of the greatest successes in our agency’s history – ridding the world of Osama Bin Ladin,” he wrote.
“We had one hell of a ride together.”
Panetta won praise for the May 2 raid that killed the al Qaeda mastermind, with the spy agency hauling away a trove of material from bin Laden’s compound.
But Panetta’s time as director was also marred by the single deadliest attack against the agency in more than two decades, when a suicide bomber who the CIA viewed as a valuable informant killed seven agency operatives at its Khost base in eastern Afghanistan.
Panetta thanked agency employees and said he had witnessed “personal courage”, “technological marvels” and “history in the making”.
Panetta, whose experience before coming to the CIA had focused more on domestic policy than intelligence or national security, said the agency had “launched the most aggressive counterterrorism operations in our history”, a reference to a stepped-up drone bombing campaign against al Qaeda and Taliban militants in northwest Pakistan.
