A new Pew Research survey finds 66% of Americans support allowing women in the military to serve in
ground units that engage in close combat, while just 26% are opposed.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced he would life the ban on women in combat last week.

Marc Ambinder: 5 silliest reactions to women in combat.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) tells Roll Call “that so far, he has not counted a single Democratic ‘no’ vote on the question of whether former Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel should be confirmed as Defense secretary.”

The Week: Hagel defined by Vietnam.

Bob Woodward: “The two share similar views and philosophies as the Obama administration attempts to define the role of the United States in the transition to a post-superpower world. This worldview is part hawk and part dove. It amounts, in part, to a challenge to the wars of President George W. Bush. It holds that the Afghanistan war has been mismanaged and the Iraq war unnecessary. War is an option, but very much a last resort.”

“So, this thinking goes, the U.S. role in the world must be carefully scaled back — this is not a matter of choice but of facing reality; the military needs to be treated with deep skepticism; lots of strategic military and foreign policy thinking is out of date; and quagmires like Afghanistan should be avoided.”

“A brand new conservative group calling itself Americans for a Strong Defense and financed by anonymous donors is running advertisements urging Democratic senators in five states to vote against Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee to be secretary of defense,” the New York Times reports.

“Another freshly minted and anonymously backed organization, Use Your Mandate, which presents itself as a liberal gay rights group but purchases its television time through a prominent Republican firm, is attacking Mr. Hagel as ‘anti-Gay,’ ‘anti-woman’ and ‘anti-Israel’ in ads and mailers.”

“Those groups are joining at least five others that are organizing to stop Mr. Hagel’s confirmation, a goal even they acknowledge appears to be increasingly challenging. But the effort comes with a built-in consolation prize should it fail: depleting some of Mr. Obama’s political capital as he embarks on a new term with fresh momentum.”

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta “is removing the military’s ban on women serving in combat, opening hundreds of thousands of front-line positions and potentially elite commando jobs after more than a decade at war,” the AP reports.

The New York Times reports President Obama will get the first test of his second term when former Sen. Chuck Hagel’s (R-NE) confirmation hearing to be the next secretary of defense gets underway this week.

Hagel “has begun the uphill task of winning over hostile Republicans… Privately, administration officials figure that Mr. Hagel could get as
many as 60 votes, a threshold that would allow him to overcome a
filibuster. Even with a few votes shy of 60, Congressional aides said,
it is not clear Republicans will try to block his confirmation.”

Aaron David Miller points out that the bumpy nomination and confirmation process for Chuck Hagel to be the next defense secretary isn’t really about Hagel himself.

“This is really a fight about Barack Obama. It is being driven by three somewhat overlapping constituencies — a pro-Israel community that doesn’t trust the president, a Republican party and a neoconservative elite struggling unsuccessfully to define its own foreign policy identity, and finally, a party in opposition that is determined to remind Obama that, reelected or not, he doesn’t have a free hand.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who is seen as a key to Chuck Hagel’s becoming Defense secretary, is backing the former Nebraska Republican senator — despite past controversial statements on Israel, Iran, and the “Jewish lobby,” NBC News reports.

Said Schumer: “Based on several key assurances provided by Senator Hagel, I am currently prepared to vote for his confirmation. I encourage my Senate colleagues who have shared my previous concerns to also support him.”

“Suicides in the U.S. military surged to a record 349 last year, far exceeding American combat deaths in Afghanistan, and some private experts are predicting the dark trend will worsen this year,” the AP reports.

“The problem reflects severe strains on military personnel burdened with more than a decade of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, complicated by anxiety over the prospect of being forced out of a shrinking force.”

Washington Post: “Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano will remain in the
same post as President Obama begins a second term… While not unexpected, her remaining in place means that most of
Obama’s first-term Cabinet will begin the second term unchanged.”

“There are number of staffers who are coming forth now just talking about how he dealt with them.”

— Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), in an interview on This Week, raising questions about former Sen. Chuck Hagel’s (R-NE) temperament and suitability to be defense secretary.

National Memo: 5 Republicans who were for Hagel before they were against him.

“Chuck Hagel’s uncertain path to the position of defense secretary is turning in large measure on the stance of one senator, New York’s Chuck Schumer, whose opinion is likely to influence a group of fellow Democrats who, like him, have remained uncommitted,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“It would be hard for Mr. Schumer, who is generally loyal to his party, to oppose Mr. Hagel. But the senator has won strong support among constituents and donors for being an advocate for Israel, and he has so far declined to endorse Mr. Hagel’s nomination, saying only that he needs to study his former colleague’s record and question him about it.”

“For a man who spent 12 years in the Senate, Chuck Hagel will find himself with few close allies when the Armed Services Committee takes up his nomination to be secretary of defense this month,” the New York Times reports.

“Of the senators who will ultimately sit in judgment, 42 never served a day with Mr. Hagel. The ones who remain include powerful Republicans who clashed repeatedly with him over what was the singular issue of the time: the American invasion of Iraq and its bloody aftermath.”

“Actually, I don’t know what the hell the larger message is, come to think of it.”

— Former Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-NE), quoted by Politico, on the significance of Chuck Hagel’s nomination to be secretary of defense.

Mark Halperin suggests Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is the key to whether former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) will ultimately be confirmed as defense secretary.

“To beat someone, a nominee who doesn’t have a scandal — no one is alleging any impropriety or scandal or personal problem; it’s all about policy. Very rare to beat somebody on just policy, particularly if it stays an inside game. Are there people in Washington and in elite circles who want to stop Hagel? Absolutely. Is the public engaged on this? No way, not now. And the challenge for people who oppose is to do one of two things. Either to get the public engaged and say we want to stop Chuck Hagel. Unlikely. Or to pick off a prominent Democratic senator, who, in the end, says, ‘I can’t vote for this person.’ Schumer is the key. If Schumer supports Hagel, it’s almost impossible to imagine them stopping him from being confirmed.”

First Read: “Hagel’s support, at best, in the Senate is an inch deep and that ‘inch’
would get him the votes he needs. But it wouldn’t take much for the
bottom to, well, fall out. This is going to be a precarious few weeks.”

Meanwhile, breaking with standard procedure for a high profile nominee, Hagel gave an interview with the Lincoln Journal Star to defend his “unequivocal, total support for Israel”

Frank Wilkinson says the nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel as defense secretary “represents both an affront to Republicans, who have never honestly reckoned with the disasters of George W. Bush’s foreign policy, and to Democrats, who have spent decades crafting foreign policy designed in part to avoid inciting aggression not from abroad, but from Republicans.”

“Obama may or may not believe Hagel is the best person for the job. But he certainly is mindful of the challenge he has just laid down. Unless opponents can restrict the debate on Hagel to his views — real or imagined — on Israel, they risk litigating the disastrous policies that Hagel rejected and his most vociferous critics embraced.”

“An oddly similar battle awaits on the debt ceiling. Obama says that, unlike 2011, he will not negotiate on the debt ceiling. To hold that line, he will have to explain — repeatedly — that spending is initiated in the House and passed by Congress. In other words, the battle presents an opportunity to stick Republicans with their share of blame for the deficit, a reckoning they have evaded as assiduously as the one on Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“The plan, according to administration officials, is to cast Hagel as a
war veteran, a Republican who still shares ideals with a party that has
largely shunned him, and — above all else — someone who won’t set
official U.S. policy,” BuzzFeed reports.

“The White House’s strategy seeks to sell Hagel as a technocrat with
an impeccable record of military service whose only sin against the GOP
in the Senate was his opposition to the Iraq war — a conflict that is
now immensely unpopular. Once that image is articulated to the public,
an administration official said, Obama will dare Republicans to vote
against him.”

Mark Halperin: “The two most important senators in this nomination right now are
McConnell and McCain. If Hagel has their support, he should be home
free. If he loses one or both of them, and even a single Democrat, the
dynamics become more challenging for the White House.”

Peter Beinhart: “What makes Hagel so important, and so threatening to the Republican
foreign-policy elite, is that he is one of the few prominent
Republican-aligned politicians and commentators (George Will and Francis
Fukuyama are others, but such voices are rare) who was intellectually
changed by Iraq. And Hagel was changed, in large measure, because he
bore within him intellectual (and physical) scar tissue from Vietnam…. the Iraq War sparked something visceral in Hagel, as the former Vietnam
rifleman realized that, once again, detached and self-interested elites
were sending working-class kids like himself to die in a war they
couldn’t honestly defend.”

Andrew Sullivan: “To my mind, this is his core qualification. Unlike so many of the
lemmings and partisans of Washington DC, Hagel actually called out the
catastrophe of the Iraq War as it happened. The neocons cannot forgive
him for exposing what they wrought on the nation and the world.”

Wonk Wire: Hagel would give Obama policy cover.