Glenn Thrush is senior staff writer at Politico Magazine.

Since he became President Obama’s secretary of defense earlier this year, Chuck Hagel, the ruthlessly candid and occasionally contrarian former Republican senator from Nebraska, has mostly kept his inner maverick in check. He’s been so much of an enigma in nine muted months at the Pentagon that one frequent critic, Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), was heard to ask aloud, “What’s with this guy?” as she emerged from a low-energy meeting with the heavy-lidded defense secretary, according to one fellow senator. So White House officials were stunned when Hagel abruptly spit the bit over the summer.

By August, the first round of across-the-board cuts mandated by the congressionally imposed process known as budget sequestration had forced the Pentagon to slash its massive personnel costs. Obama’s White House team was controlling the talking points, and these defense cuts were an especially powerful part of their political message: Republicans, they claimed, were willing to endanger national security to appease their anti-government Tea Party wing. So it came as unwelcome news when Hagel declared—without getting West Wing approval—that he was exercising his authority to reinstate five of 11 furlough days for the department’s civilian employees, according to several current and former administration officials. White House aides called Hagel’s team to complain. The secretary didn’t care. He was growing increasingly concerned that the administration was ignoring the Pentagon’s budget and readiness crises, and he directed his staff to give a mid-level agency bureaucrat a one-hour head’s up before he went public. “Hagel didn’t want to slow the process down,” a former defense official told me. “So he just decided to do it, and he did it… Message sent.”


It’s too early to tell if Hagel’s sotto voce declaration of independence was a genuine pivot point. But it’s clear the 67-year-old Vietnam War hero is entering the make-or-break phase of his Pentagon stewardship, according to about a dozen current and former West Wing and Pentagon officials I spoke with. Up until recently, they say, Hagel appeared shaky, a career legislator struggling with his first big command—and under constant fire. “How would I describe him right now? He’s a paper tiger,” says a longtime Obama campaign and White House adviser. “He’s a great guy and a war hero. The regular troops love him. … It’s not quite buyer’s remorse, but he needs to show us more.”

Obama’s people may yet get their wish, if perhaps in ways they hadn’t quite anticipated. In recent days, Secretary of State John Kerry has hogged the spotlight with his headlong-into-the-breach diplomacy with Iran. But it is Hagel who might face the potentially greater career-defining moment: Over the next six weeks, he’ll have to battle Congress, and perhaps some on Obama’s West Wing team, to forestall unprecedented new defense cuts that, when added to the first round of sequester cuts, could slash as much as $100 billion a year (according to Obama administration estimates) from a Pentagon accustomed to Bush-era annual budgets of $700 billion. It’s the sort of bloodletting that could force commanders to choose between modern weapons systems, funding benefits programs or paying to retain enough troops to meet new threats. In effect, what has followed the low-key secretary (self-effacing to a fault—he has described defense as “the fourth” most powerful gig in Obama’s Cabinet) to his memento-crammed office on the third floor of the Pentagon is a fight that could now determine the ambition of the military in the post-Afghanistan and Iraq era.

“How would I describe him right now? He’s a paper tiger,” says a longtime White House advisor. “He’s a great guy and a war hero. The regular troops love him … but he needs to show us more.”

There’s no doubt that Hagel shares Obama’s philosophy of a leaner and more efficient military, and he voiced only perfunctory objections to the $50 billion-a-year hit the Pentagon took in the 2012 budget deal—and toes the administration line that all sequester cuts, to military and domestic programs, need to be restores in full. He also embraced a long-term Obama budget proposal that would backload billions of dollars more in cuts over the next decade. But the additional $20 billion to $50 billion in yearly cuts due to take effect next month if congressional negotiators can’t avert a second sequester are too much for Hagel. Obama opposes the cuts too, but Hagel is pressing to de-link the Pentagon’s budget from the non-defense budget, a stance that puts him in conflict with the White House bargaining position at a crucial moment: If Republicans want to avoid the defense cuts, Obama is trying to make the case that they will also have to spare the ax for an array of social welfare and infrastructure programs. “If you just to start to carve out certain popular items from the sequester you don’t solve the problem,” a person close to Obama told me when asked about Hagel’s position. “Chuck is just doing his job. … He wants to exempt the military from the sequester, and that’s understandable. But we’re looking to get rid of the sequester across the board.”

Hagel has directed most of his public comments at GOP budget-cutters but he’s also made it clear he’s dissatisfied with some in the administration, especially Obama’s Office of Management and Budget Director Sylvia Mathews Burwell who, in the words of one Hagel confidant, “just doesn’t get the urgency” of the threat. “This is an irresponsible way to govern, and it forces the department into a very bad set of choices," Hagel said earlier this month of the sequester, speaking to an audience at the Reagan Library.

John Kerry has hogged the spotlight with his headlong-into-the-breach diplomacy on Iran. But it is Hagel, with his upcoming battle with Congress and maybe even the White House to forestall proposed defense cuts, who may face the greater career-defining moment. | Reuters

But here’s where the months of lackluster leadership at the Pentagon might pose a key problem for Hagel, a former infantry squad leader in Vietnam now entering a big bureaucratic fight well below full battle strength. His top deputy, the highly regarded Ashton Carter—himself a candidate for defense secretary and a man who has been running the place day to day for two years—is leaving this month. Several top-level former defense officials, including the department’s one-time No. 3, Michèle Flournoy, another also-ran for the secretaryship when Hagel got the job, have rebuffed entreaties to join the team, say people close to the situation.

Hagel’s grasp of granular budget and manpower issues have improved greatly over the last few months, and people close to him say he has even booted out staffers from briefings if they don’t have the information he needs at the ready. But he’s still a relative neophyte, and having a first-class deputy remains a necessity. “I sure hope it's a strong pick,” says Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). “And I sure hope it's somebody with experience in the Pentagon.”

That Hagel is the secretary of defense at all is a minor political miracle. He nearly flamed out during late January confirmation hearings—he mortified his handlers by suggesting he could live with a nuclear-armed Iran until he was handed a note telling him: nope, no way, take it back—where he looked confused, sluggish and generally unprepared, leading to the tightest confirmation vote of any Obama cabinet official. The performance made Hagel easy pickings for critics like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who blasted Hagel as an ally of Tehran and enemy of Israel. His near-mute testimony this fall defending the administration’s muddled Syria policy, especially alongside Kerry's much more animated performance, was nearly as unimpressive. “Next time we have a hearing and he sits next to John Kerry at a hearing, you know, I'd like to hear from him too,” quips McCain, a fellow Vietnam veteran who considers himself to be Hagel’s friend, despite Hagel’s decision not to endorse him during the 2008 general election. “He's been kind of low-visibility. But I don't think necessarily he's been a weak secretary of defense.”

Indeed, a low-key manager is what Obama’s national security team wanted to succeed first-term Pentagon chiefs Bob Gates, a steely commander who steadied the place after the disastrous invasion of Iraq under Donald Rumsfeld, and Leon Panetta, a canny former member of Congress and White House chief of staff who ran the building, in the words of one former subordinate, “like a big Italian dinner.” By the time of Panetta’s exit, almost all key strategic decisions on Iraq and Afghanistan had been made and Obama settled on Hagel in part because he was convinced that a Republican, even one mostly estranged from his party, would be best positioned to oversee a new era of contraction and recalibration. Hagel embraced the position, and rather than compete with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, Kerry and national security adviser Susan Rice for a marquee foreign policy role, he has focused on allocating resources wisely and on adapting the military’s postwar strategy toward the challenges of the future in a rising Asia rather than the lingering complications of the last century’s conflicts still so evident in the Middle East. “That stuff is really unsexy but someone’s got to do it,” says Andrew Exum, a former Army Ranger and Pentagon consultant.

Hagel has been bracingly candid about his role. “I've never seen my job or the time I’ll spend here as defining a Hagel era,” he told the Atlantic’s Steve Clemons in an October interview. “I’ve never seen it that way. … I don't see it as a Hagel imprint. The way I do see my role is what can I do to improve our security? What can I do to improve this institution while I'm here? How can I enhance it by my leadership and by my presence? And then the rest of it takes care of itself.”

If Hagel’s furrowed face looks like frozen masonry on C-Span, he is steady and forthright in the flesh, which has endeared him to staffers and helped him overcome suspicions inside the Pentagon that he’s an Obama yes-man. He works the building like he used to work the Nebraska State Fair, a bit awkwardly but with plenty of gusto. On the Monday before Thanksgiving, I was allowed to peek into his office as a three-star general squired in an elderly civilian employee and his wife for a photo op. After presenting the man with a plaque celebrating 50 years of service, Hagel asked the man's wife what she planned to cook for the holiday. “Turkey, um, with cranberries,” she answered nervously, and then asked him what he planned to eat. “Oh, I’m from Indian country,” Hagel declared. “We eat steak!”

Hagel's near-mute testimony this fall defending the administration’s muddled Syria policy, especially alongside an animated John Kerry, was unimpressive. | AP Photo

He may be at ease with his employees, but Hagel has clearly been thrown off his politician’s game by his terrible debut. He was “deeply shaken” by his self-inflicted confirmation trauma, a source who counts him as a friend told me, “and was really shocked by how hostile the political environment had become.” At times, he’s seemed more like a secretary on defense—an outsider squeezed between Obama’s political imperatives and the Pentagon brass he’s now surrounded by. In late August, Hagel argued privately to the White House against a military strike in Syria and was overruled by Obama. He sat mostly in silence when he and Kerry appeared together ostensibly to sell the intervention policy to the Hill, and he flubbed key facts when he did speak, including a faulty assertion that Russia had been the main supplier of Syria’s homegrown chemical weapons program. Even then, he was overshadowed by Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who made no secret of his frustration with the White House, which then quickly blamed Dempsey for leaks questioning the effectiveness of a limited missile attack on Syria and the logistics of mustering forces to pull it off.

Hagel is steady and forthright in the flesh, which has endeared him to staffers and helped him overcome suspicions inside the Pentagon that he’s an Obama yes-man. | Reuters

Behind the scenes as this Syria drama played out, Hagel was preoccupied with a different struggle: the budget crisis that is likely to consume his Pentagon tenure. By the fall, he was beginning to grasp just how degraded Army and Marine units had become after years of war. The Pentagon’s Strategic Choices and Management Review—a deep-dive report issued in late summer—painted a bleak picture: To cover the cost for modern weapons systems, the Pentagon would need to shrink the Army and Marines to about 520,000 troops, the smallest force since the end of World War II, and far below the 700,000 the department deemed sufficient to deal with emerging threats. The “Skimmer,” as the report is known in the building, nudged Hagel closer to the service chiefs, especially Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno, a hard-charging battlefield commander who had clashed with Hagel over the Iraq surge years before.

The paradox is that Hagel, a brash non-commissioned officer who once counseled an inexperienced Senator Obama to stand up the generals seven years ago, now finds himself increasingly motivated by their priorities. “There’s a cognitive disconnect between the Pentagon and the White House, and he’s aware of that,” a Panetta-era Pentagon official told me.

The balancing act—between the attraction to power and the compulsion to buck authority—is the leitmotif of Hagel’s four-decade career. In 1968, Hagel, a 21-year-old army sergeant, found himself leading a unit that, contrary to military regulations, included his younger brother Tom. In the span of a month, the two took turns saving each other’s lives. When Chuck was struck by shrapnel in the chest, Tom patched it, stanching a fountain of blood with a bandage. Weeks after that, Chuck pulled his unconscious brother from a burning personnel carrier, later telling a reporter, “I vowed then to do what I could to stop wars.”

A disaffected Tom Hagel, like John Kerry, turned against the war when he returned home and embraced liberal, anti-war politics. Chuck Hagel took John McCain’s change-the-system-from-the-inside path. He became active in Republican politics, and the two brothers sometimes came to blows over their political differences.

Chuck would go on to make a fortune in the cell phone business, before later carving out a unique political niche in the Senate. To no one’s surprise, he was among the first Republicans to call President George W. Bush to account for the series of mistakes that led to the Iraq debacle, and he joined Obama in speaking out against the Iraq troop surge in 2007—which he called the “most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.” He spurned his friend McCain a year later during the general election, tacitly supporting Obama’s anti-war candidacy.

Since being appointed to run the Pentagon, Hagel has been cast in a supporting actor role, says Tom Ricks, the Pulitzer Prize winner who wrote the definitive account of the Bush administration’s management failures in Iraq. He regards Hagel as “a soporific version of William Cohen,” Bill Clinton’s low-key second-term defense secretary, “another Senate Armed Services [Committee member] picked by a Dem late in the administration to keep the deck chairs from sloshing over the side. Not a bad guy to have at the end of a presidency.”

That perception isn’t entirely fair. Hagel played a critical role in keeping open ties with the Egyptian military following its overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood and he’s also been the administration’s standard-bearer on its fits-and-starts focus on Asia, making three trips to the region in the first few months he was in office while Kerry focused on the Middle East. In recent days, he’s burned up the phone lines with Japanese leaders in order to avoid any provocation over Beijing’s announcement demanding airspace control over a vast swath of the East China Sea—but he was also supportive of the decision to send a flight of unarmed B-52s to the disputed zone as a show of force. In another small act of self-assertion, he ordered the aircraft carrier U.S.S. George Washington to the Philippines in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan with only a cursory head’s up to Obama’s national security team, which was debating whether or not to “militarize” the response, according to a defense official.

Hagel has taken on thankless tasks, too, serving as Obama’s human shield on the sensitive issue of the Pentagon’s sexual assault adjudication policy; Hagel has embraced some internal reforms but resisted Senate efforts to remove investigations from the military’s chain of command, a proposal that is anathema to his top commanders but a position that has earned him the ire of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.). “He has not shown leadership. … I think he has not lived up to his promises, the promises of having the passion and the drive for rooting out the scourge of sexual violence,” she told me. “I don’t think that he has lived up to my expectations.”

Dealing with these external pressures might actually be easier than the internal challenges. All second-term secretaries are forced to confront a brain drain, but Hagel is finding that replacing outgoing staffers is an especially tall order for a Pentagon bracing for a future of tightening budgets and diminishing influence. The departure of Carter, Hagel’s highly regarded deputy secretary, doesn't come as a surprise given that Carter had been passed over for the top job. But clearly there was friction; he had agitated, with little success, for Hagel to take a more active role in foreign policy, according to people close to both men. When Hagel’s team quietly reached out to Flournoy about her interest—the former Pentagon policy planning chief who left the administration after also being short-listed for the secretary job—she politely declined the offer, according to three people familiar with the situation. Lesser-known Robert Work, a 60-year-old former undersecretary of the Navy, is now considered the top candidate but Hagel was still interviewing other officials as recently as last week, according to administration officials.

In October, Ash Carter (right), Hagel’s highly regarded deputy secretary who had been passed over for the top job, announced he was stepping down after two years of supervising the operations of the department. | Reuters

Hagel has had similar problems filling the department’s vacated top policy post. Over the past month, Hagel’s team has reportedly gauged the interest of several candidates, including Kurt Campbell, a former top State Department official who co-founded (with Flournoy) the Center for a New American Security. Another prominent think-tanker, Kathleen Hicks of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, also took a pass. “To some extent you are seeing the Clinton effect,” says a former defense official who served under President Bill Clinton and recently turned down a Pentagon job offer. “Why take the risks of working in a second Obama administration, when you can make $300,000 in the private sector and then go work for Hillary?”

Of course Hagel’s greatest challenge may be figuring out the insider game in an administration known for aggregating national security power in the West Wing. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a hawk who admires Hagel’s independence, says he would be wise to emulate his predecessor, Panetta, a sharp-elbowed bureaucratic infighter with an avuncular public image. “Chuck needs to pick up where Panetta left off … fight ’em from the inside. … If he’s not following Leon’s lead, he’s making a big mistake.”

Hagel seems to be moving in that direction. He has butted heads with Burwell, the OMB director, over how she is pitching the impact of the cuts to Congress, pressing her to illustrate more vividly—district-by-district—the effects that defense cuts would have on members of Congress. And he has quietly made the case to McDonough and others that they need to take a more active role in bipartisan budget negotiations being run by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), at a time when most of Obama’s attention has been occupied by meltdown of Obamacare. Hagel has also taken a few less conventional steps, meeting last month with Tina Tchen, Michelle Obama’s chief of staff, in an effort to convince the first lady that Pentagon cuts will hit military families hardest. Meanwhile, Hagel has upped his public profile, sitting for a series of mostly gaffe-free interviews with foreign policy reporters and delivering speeches suggesting, ever so subtly, that he won’t remain silent if Obama allows the sequester cuts to go through.

But critics wonder if Hagel will directly challenge Obama, whom he befriended in the Senate at a time when the Illinois freshman knew next to nothing about foreign or military affairs. Even Hagel’s allies aren’t sure entirely how committed he is to holding the line on budget cuts, or even what that line is. He raised eyebrows among Senate Democrats in November by telling Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), “I don’t have money, but I can handle that,” during a phone conversation—which they read as a “sign of weakness,” in the words of one Democratic senator who told me about it.

Republicans, clearly relishing the travails of a turncoat, are less charitable. “The first thing he’s got to do is confront the political team in the White House which is … asserting too much influence over policy decisions,” says Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), an Armed Services Committee member and one of 27 Senate Republicans to oppose Hagel’s confirmation. “I just think it’s his duty to speak the truth to the president and stand up, and you can’t just always continue in office if you are asked to execute a policy that you truly believe is harmful. You have to make up your mind if you should stay or leave.”

If his own history is any guide, Hagel isn’t about to rip off his stripes in protest. “He’s not going anywhere,” said a senior administration official close to the secretary. Yet it’s hard not to hear a 1980s-vintage Republican strain in Hagel’s recent public utterances on the need to maintain a robust defense, and he has become increasingly fond of invoking another president, the first one for whom he ever worked.

“President Reagan understood the importance of the readiness of our defense enterprise,” Hagel—who helped run the Gipper’s Nebraska operation in 1980—told his audience at the Reagan Library last month. “President Reagan inherited a military that was still grappling with the legacy of the Vietnam War. … [He] began the rebuilding of America's military readiness and capabilities. But it took leadership, it took time and it took resources.”

Glenn Thrush is senior staff writer for Politico Magazine .