Secretary Of Defense | featured news

Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, plans to seek a vote on Chuck Hagel's nomination as President Barack Obama's new secretary of defense during a meeting on Tuesday afternoon, the committee said on Monday.

President Obama is expected to nominate Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator and Vietnam veteran, to be secretary of Defense, officials said, setting up a confirmation battle with lawmakers and interest groups critical of his views on Israel and Iran.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta marked on Thursday the end of the U.S. war in Iraq, with the last American troops withdrawing nearly nine years after the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein.

Not even the former U.S. Secretary of Defense gets a pass when it comes to pat-downs at O'Hare International Airport.

A day after stepping down as CIA director, Leon Panetta was sworn in Friday as secretary of defense. He began settling into the job by telling members of the military and their families they are "at the top of my agenda."...

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Friday he was disappointed by criticism from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates over the release of about 75,000 pages of U.S. documents related to the war in Afghanistan.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told troops in southern Afghanistan on Tuesday they would soon be part of a "decisive phase" in the war -- an operation to impose control over the Taliban heartland of Kandahar province.

Robert Gates The Secretary of Defense will continue in that position in the Obama administration for at least another year, a Pentagon spokesman said Thursday. "Secretary Gates met with the president just before Christmas and gave him a commitment to stay on the job for at least another year," Geoff Morrell, deputy assistant secretary of defense and Pentagon press secretary, told CNN. Gates served as Secretary of Defense in the last two years of the Bush administration and stayed on in the post when President Obama took office.