Pentagon: Hagel has ‘strong’ relationship with McCain

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has a “strong” relationship with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who could end up leading the top Senate panel on defense issues in the next Congress, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

{mosads}“The secretary has a good relationship with many members of Congress, and I believe that he believes that relationship with Sen. McCain is also strong and productive, and it has been,” Pentagon press secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby said during a press briefing.

“And it has to be, given Sen. McCain’s position on the Senate Armed Services Committee,” he added.

The Arizona senator is widely expected to get the chairmanship of the powerful committee if Republicans win back the Senate majority.

McCain, known for his firebrand rhetoric, has at times had a strained relationship with Pentagon. He recently called Kirby an “idiot.”

His relationship with Hagel goes back years, as the two Vietnam veterans served alongside each other in the Senate. Hagel served two terms as a Republican senator from Nebraska before leaving office in 2009.

The two hit a rough patch in early 2013, when Hagel was nominated to lead the Pentagon.  McCain bashed Hagel for opposing the Bush administration’s “surge” of troops into Iraq in 2007 and voted against his nomination for Defense secretary.

McCain has also grilled Hagel and other administration officials in recent months over the administration’s strategy for battling the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS).

Kirby declined Tuesday to speculate on the midterm elections or what their outcome would mean for the DOD’s future.

“Whatever happens I can promise you that Secretary Hagel will continue to work very closely with Congress on very important issues of national security going forward, regardless of what happens in the polls today,” he said.

“We need Congress’s support to get done so many of the things we’re trying to get done, not the least of which is taking sequestration off our backs,” according to Kirby.

The sequester budget cuts are set to slash billions from the Pentagon’s fiscal 2016 budget unless lawmakers ease the policy.

“We are working very, very hard to try to get Congress to remove it,” Kirby told reporters.

Barring any changes, the spending cuts are “going to severely impact our ability to execute the strategy we’ve been mandated to execute by the president,” he said.

— This story was upated at 5 p.m.