Leon Panetta

No explosives were found on the Afghan national or in the truck, the officials said, and the Pentagon was so far not considering the episode an attack on Mr. Panetta. But it reinforced the lack of security in Afghanistan at the start of his visit. The two-day trip, unannounced as usual for security reasons, had been planned months previously, but had taken on a new urgency since the massacre.

Mr. Panetta, like President Obama, denounced the killings and vowed to bring the killer to justice, a message he was to deliver in person to President Hamid Karzai and top Afghan defense and interior officials. The killings have further clouded the strained Afghan-American relations.

Retrofitting the Military for an Age of Austerity

Today, Mr. Panetta’s most pressing charge is retrofitting the military for a new era of austerity. The issues on the table are enormous — the financial health of a debt-ridden country, military readiness to confront a still-dangerous world and many thousands of jobs and contractor businesses in Congressional districts around the country.

In mid-October 2011 he appeared before the House Armed Services Committee arguing against any additional cuts in military spending as a new Congressional debt committee sought more than a trillion dollars in new savings in the overall budget.

In November, Mr. Panetta said he was considering reductions in spending categories once thought sacrosanct, especially in medical and retirement benefits, as well as further shrinking the number of troops and reducing new weapons purchases.

On Jan. 5, 2012, Mr. Panetta disclosed the strategy guiding hundreds of billions of dollars in Pentagon budget cuts during an unusual Defense Department news conference,  when President Obama appeared in the Pentagon briefing room and made remarks ahead of those by Mr. Panetta and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In a shift of doctrine driven by fiscal reality and a deal in the summer of 2011 that kept the United States from defaulting on its debts, Mr. Panetta outlined plans for carefully shrinking the military. Mr. Panetta concluded that the Army has to shrink even below current targets, dropping to 490,000 soldiers over the next decade, but that the United States would not cut any of its 11 aircraft carriers.

A smaller Army is a clear sign that the Pentagon did not anticipate conducting another expensive, troop-intensive counterinsurgency campaign, like those waged in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor would the military be able to carry out two sustained ground wars at one time, as was required under past national military strategies.

As part of the new reality, Mr. Panetta proposed cuts in next-generation weapons, including delays in purchases of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jet, one of the most expensive weapons programs in history. Delaying the F-35 would leave its factories open, giving the manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, a chance to work out continuing problems in developing the plane while freeing up money that otherwise would be devoted to buying the warplane in the next year or two.

The defense secretary made it clear that the reduction would be carried out carefully, and over several years, so that combat veterans are not flooding into a tough employment market and military families do not feel that the government is breaking trust after a decade of sacrifice.  

Public Opposition to Cuts

Mr. Panetta has publicly opposed the $450 billion in automatic cuts, which he described in a statement as tearing “a seam in the nation’s defense.” By Mr. Panetta’s calculations, the cuts would reduce the 2013 budget by 23 percent — the reason Pentagon officials said they would push Congress to work out a way to avoid “sequestration,” the automatic cuts set in motion by the committee’s failure.

Mr. Panetta is not a classic military strategist who can readily evaluate weapons systems and understand the inner workings of the Pentagon. However, he has a reputation as a solid manager.

When he replaced Robert M. Gates as defense secretary, the received opinion in Washington was that the Pentagon was exchanging one low-intensity Beltway professional for another. But in substance and style — from a relentless focus on military intelligence and quashing Al Qaeda to salty remarks that left his aides scrambling to provide him cover — his early performance showed him to be another species entirely.

Humor and bluntness aside (“I’m Italian, what the frick can I tell you?” Mr. Panetta said in an interview with NBC News), the new defense secretary’s focus in the job is in striking contrast to that of the self-contained Mr. Gates. While Mr. Gates’s priorities were stabilizing Afghanistan and concluding the war in Iraq, Mr. Panetta told the troops on a visit to Baghdad of a different top goal: “No. 1, quite frankly, is to defeat Al Qaeda.”

Background

A Democrat since the early 1970s, Mr. Panetta has ties on both sides of Capitol Hill, where he served in Congress from California for eight terms, until he became President Bill Clinton’s first budget director in 1993. He then served as Mr. Clinton’s chief of staff from July 1994 to January 1997, and was credited with bringing order to what had been a chaotic White House.

Mr. Panetta previously served as director of the White House budget office and the House budget committee, and was once a moderate Republican. (He was forced out as head of the office of civil rights because the White House under President Richard M. Nixon thought he enforced discrimination laws too enthusiastically; he then went to work for Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York in 1970.) In 1971, he became a Democrat.

Mr. Panetta is the son of Italian immigrants. He served as a first lieutenant in the Army in the 1960s. Mr. Panetta has a family walnut farm in Carmel Valley, Calif.

In promoting Mr. Panetta for the C.I.A. post, Obama administration officials pointed to Mr. Panetta’s sharp managerial skills, his strong bipartisan standing on Capitol Hill, his significant foreign policy experience in the White House and his service on the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan panel that examined the war and made recommendations on United States policy. The officials noted that he had a handle on intelligence spending from his days as director of the Office and Management and Budget.

C.I.A. Record

As C.I.A. director, Mr. Panetta hastened the transformation of the spy agency into a paramilitary organization, overseeing a sharp escalation of the C.I.A.’s bombing campaign in Pakistan using armed drone aircraft, and an increase in the number of secret bases and covert operatives in remote parts of Afghanistan.

In May 2009, a behind-the-scenes power struggle erupted between Mr. Panetta and Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, after Mr. Blair sent a classified memorandum announcing that his office would use its authority to select the top American spy in each country overseas. Mr. Panetta responded by writing to agency employees that the C.I.A. was still in charge overseas, a role that C.I.A. station chiefs had jealously guarded for decades.

Mr. Panetta also clashed with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. when he appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the abuse of terrorism detainees, a step Mr. Panetta portrayed as demoralizing for the agency.

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