Isn't Chuck Hagel the luckiest man in Washington? Now that he's finished running a bruising gauntlet through the Senate, during which his former GOP Senate colleagues implied he was an Israel-hater and a weakling, he'll run a Pentagon that's freaking out about a massive budget cut scheduled for Friday.

Seventy-one senators voted Tuesday to break a short-lived Republican tactic to stall a vote to confirm Hagel, assuring he'd become the next secretary of defense. Hours later, as expected, Hagel got a 58-41 majority of Senate votes to make it to the Pentagon's top job.

In his January Senate hearing, Hagel did a notably bad job of defending his past positions on cutting the nuclear arsenal and opposing unilateral economic sanctions on Iran. The charges against Hagel went further: a story by Breitbart.com claimed, citing unnamed Senate sources, that Hagel received funding from a group called "Friends of Hamas," which Danger Room pal Dave Weigel of Slate determined does not exist. A New York Daily News reporter later wrote that he made an "obvious joke" about Hagel and the nonexistent organization to a Senate staffer, who in turn kickstarted a damaging rumor.

All that is done with. Hagel's first task at the Pentagon is to figure out how to mitigate the Defense Department's impending, abrupt loss of $46 billion during the remainder of the fiscal year, overwhelmingly from its operations and maintenance accounts. The cuts, a combination of automatic spending reductions scheduled for Friday and diminished funds resulting from Congress' failure to pass a defense bill, will create, at some point, an "intolerable risk" for U.S. national security, according to Pentagon chief spokesman George Little.

The armed services are already talking about cutting operations in 2013 to preserve their ability to respond to unforeseen challenges. The Navy is cutting aircraft carrier deployments and talking about ending operations in South America. The Air Force is grounding planes and the Army is cutting training for units back from Afghanistan. Little told reporters at the Pentagon on Tuesday that the military isn't "crying wolf" on the impact of the cuts, even though the overall level of military funding under sequestration will be roughly at 2007 levels.

If there's an irony here, it's that the senators most fervently opposed to Hagel generally oppose the Pentagon cuts – although the Republican legislative bloc has split over the question of opposing the sequester. They'll look to Hagel to advocate for greater Pentagon funding, including a repeal of the sequester, as Hagel predecessor Leon Panetta did. Hagel said in his confirmation hearing that he also opposed the sequester, calling it a dumb way to curb what he earlier described as Pentagon bloat.

The next several weeks should determine how magnanimous Hagel wants to be in victory. Hagel might decide that he's already got congressional budget hawks on his side, since there isn't another defense secretary they can appeal to. And Hagel's allies are encouraging him to seek revenge by canceling military projects in the districts of his accusers. At the Pentagon, Little said Hagel plans to be a "team player" with Congress.

Then there's another challenge, one that will go a long way to determining the stamp Hagel intends to leave on the Pentagon. Military officials have said the budget cuts call into question their ability to carry out the defense strategy the Obama administration unveiled last year, heavy on drones, special operations forces and emphasizing Asia. Little said the Pentagon was unprepared to revise that strategy, calling it "right." But unless the cuts are repealed, Hagel might need to recast that ostensibly fundamental document. That should end all debate about just how dovish the new defense secretary actually is.