This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Jan. 31, 2013 - WASHINGTON – Sparring with Republicans about prior statements on Israel and Iran, Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel defended his record at his confirmation hearing Thursday and agreed with Missouri senators' comments related to wartime contracting and the defense industrial base.
During the marathon hearing, Hagel, a decorated Vietnam combat vet and a former GOP U.S. senator, responded to dozens of questions about his past votes or comments on hot-button issues and was repeatedly accused of changing his position on some of them. But he countered by saying that “no one individual vote, no one individual quote ... defines me. My overall worldview has never changed: that America has and must maintain the strongest military in the world, that we must lead in the international community to confront threats and challenges together.”
Responding to questioning, Hagel committed himself to pursue two of U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill’s priorities: drawing lessons from wartime contracting abuses and making it possible to audit the Pentagon’s balance sheet. He also generally agreed with U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt that it is important to maintain the military’s industrial base, with both of them mentioning the F/A-18 assembly line in Hazelwood as an example.
While McCaskill, D-Mo., said Hagel had been treated unfairly by some GOP senators who took his past comments out of context, she wasn’t ready to announce her support.
“He cleared up a lot of the smoke and mirrors that is being used against him where an individual vote or an individual quote is used against him, taken out of context in terms of his entire record,” McCaskill said. However, she said Hagel “has not always been hyper-careful about his choice of words.
“While you have the freedom to do that as a senator, you’ve got to be really careful when you are leading our nation’s military,” the Missouri Democrat said.
If confirmed by the Senate, Hagel, 66, would be the first Vietnam vet and former enlisted man to become secretary of Defense. In their introductions, two former chairs of the Senate armed services panel -- Sam Nunn, a Democrat, and John Warner, a Republican -- praised Hagel as exceptionally well qualified.
>Blunt, R-Mo., was polite in his questioning but skeptical about the nominee. "I don’t think it’s been a particularly good day for Sen. Hagel," he told reporters. "But it may not be a day that prevents the president from getting the person he wants in a Cabinet-level job."
While several Senate Republicans have announced their opposition to Hagel, Blunt – who met privately with Hagel for 45 minutes earlier this week – told reporters he would not make up his mind until after he had studied the nominee’s responses and new material.
START UPDATE:On Friday, Blunt announced that he would vote against Hagel, but told MSNBC he would be unlikely to back a possible GOP filibuster of the nomination. In a statement, Blunt said Hagel’s responses to senators' questions were "too inconsistent, particularly as they related to Iran and Israel.
"The idea that we can contain a nuclear Iran and his view that we should not have unilateral sanctions are just wrong and are too dangerous for us to try.” He added that Hagel's views "do not reflect the kind of leadership that we need from our Secretary of Defense."
U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., followed suit later on Friday, opposing Hagel in part because of his Iran comments at the hearing. “Senator Hagel instinctively called the Iranian government both elected and legitimate. He initially offered strong support for containment of Iran, rather than President Obama's stated policy of preventing an Iranian nuclear breakout," Kirk said in a statement.
He added that Hagel "could not clearly explain his past opposition to unilateral sanctions against Iran – opposition as recent as 2008. And at no time did he state his position on whether the European Union should formally designate Iran's terror proxy, Hezbollah, as a terrorist organization." END UPDATE
In his first round of questions, Blunt had focused on the need to maintain the military’s force structure at a time of looming budget cutbacks – including the likely start of an across-the-board sequester next month.
Hagel called that challenge “one of the priorities of the next few years: resetting equipment and, essentially, re-shaping our force structure – but also renewing our force structure.” He said he had never supported the sequester cuts.
Mentioning the F/A-18 assembly line, Blunt stressed the need to maintain the military’s industrial base at a time of budget cutbacks. If the U.S. purchases end and foreign sales don’t continue, Blunt asked: “If you ever close that line down … how do we keep our capacity?”
Citing the need to “maintain our industrial base,” Hagel called the F/A-18 (whose production involves about 4,000 Boeing Co. employees in the St. Louis region) “a good example of what we’re going to have to continue to keep strong.” And he worried about “arbitrary” cutbacks that could have an impact on the military’s industrial base.
Afterward, Blunt told reporters he “was happy with” some of Hagel’s responses on the force structure and the problems of sequester cuts. “But I’m not sure it fits in to the entire strategy that he and the administration are advancing.”
In his second round of questions, Blunt expressed concerns about comments Hagel had made on U.S. support of Israel and his remark to an interviewer in 2011 that the Pentagon budget was "bloated."
McCain, Hagel spar over 'surge' in Iraq
One of the sharpest exchanges during the day-long hearing occurred when U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. -- a champion of the 2007 military “surge” – tried to get Hagel to say that opposition to the surge was wrong.
After Hagel declined to give a simple yes or no answer, saying a judgment about the surge should be left to historians, McCain lambasted him.
“I think history has already made a judgment about the surge sir, and you’re on the wrong side of it,” McCain said, adding that Hagel’s “refusal to answer whether you were right or wrong on it is going to have an impact on my judgment on whether to vote for your confirmation.”
McCaskill told the Beacon that she thought Hagel was simply trying to give an honest response to McCain. “I think [McCain] was trying to get Chuck Hagel to say the words, ‘I made a mistake.’ And, of course, if Hagel had said those words, [opponents] would be using that against him.”>
Another attack came from U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who criticized Hagel’s decision not to cosign several important letters related to Middle East policy when he was a senator. Hagel answered "no" to Graham’s statement, couched in the form of a question:
“Do you think that the sum total of your record, all that together, that the image you've created is one of sending the worst possible signal to our enemies and friends at one of the most critical times in world history?”
Numerous questions from senators focused on Hagel’s one-time opposition to unilateral U.S. sanctions against Iran. Responding to the committee’s chair, U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., Hagel explained that he had voted against unilateral U.S. sanctions against Iran in 2001 and 2002 because “we were at a different place with Iran at that time” – in contrast to today’s situation, when Iran is developing nuclear weapons.
In response to a series of “yes or no” questions from McCaskill, Hagel reiterated that he backs current multilateral sanctions against Iran, that he supports Israel, and that he agrees with a bipartisan group of former U.S. officials who have called for arms control agreements to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons.
In an interview, McCaskill said Hagel was “very clear about his support of Israel and his support for everything being on the table to stop Iran from nuclear capability.” She said he made it clear that “he does not favor unilateral disarmament,” although he – like many other U.S. officials of both parties – would like reductions in nuclear arsenals.
Less supportive, Blunt told reporters that some of Hagel’s responses on tough issues “were effectively non-answers,” such as insisting that his past comments were often taken out of context. And he said some responses were misleading.
“In terms of further spending on the military, in answer to one of my questions, [Hagel] said his statement was made before sequestration was put in place as a possibility” in the budget act of August 2011, Blunt said. “When I checked the record after that line of questions, it was a month AFTER sequestration was voted on.”
Hagel wants analysis of 'astounding' contract waste
In her questioning, McCaskill told Hagel it is essential that the Defense Department’s overall balance sheet be made more transparent, so that spending can be more closely examined at a time of federal budget reductions.
“As we face shrinking budgets and as we want to secure the preeminence of our military and not hollow out the spending at the Defense Department,” she said, “audit-ability is a crucial ingredient to us being able to figure out whether all the money that being spent there is being spent like Americans would want it to be spent.”
Responding, Hagel said he would commit to making sure that Pentagon accounts are “auditable” no later than 2017 to make contracting more transparent.
In an interview, McCaskill explained later that auditing is “an absolutely essential priority” because the Pentagon’s spending and business systems are “so out of control ... We can audit individual contracts; there are many auditors that work at the DoD in various capacities.
"But the overall balance sheet of the Pentagon is not auditable at this point because there are different systems used in different places in the military.”
On another issue her subcommittee has investigated, McCaskill pressed Hagel to commit to a thorough evaluation of the impact that massive U.S. spending on infrastructure improvements in Iraq and Afghanistan had on the counter-insurgency strategy.
“I have yet to have provided to me ... any data that would indicate that major infrastructure rebuilding as part of a counterinsurgency strategy works,” McCaskill said.
Hagel said he shared McCaskill’s concerns about infrastructure expenditures and said he would “go deeper and wider” in reporting on waste, fraud and abuse in wartime contracting and would question big U.S. commitments to infrastructure improvements in Afghanistan.
“Our special inspector generals have come up with billions and billions of dollars that are unaccounted for,” Hagel said. “Corruption, fraud, waste, abuse. It really is quite astounding.” He added: “How do we fix it? What do we do? How do we learn from this?
“We need to learn from this,” Hagel said, asserting that “we overloaded the circuits of our military. We said: ‘You do it. You’ve got the money. You’ve got the organization. You’ve got the people. Now go do it.'”
After his comments, McCaskill told the Beacon that she was hopeful that Hagel – if confirmed – could help study the record and come up with valuable lessons to be applied in any future conflicts.
“At what point in time are we going to do the gut-check and really analyze whether or not major infrastructure spending is an effective part of the counterinsurgency strategy?” McCaskill said.
“Or do we need to look at those resources and see if they could either be saved – on behalf of the American taxpayer – or spent more effectively, in terms of military mission.”