Summary Panetta removed barriers to women in direct combat jobs.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - On his last trip abroad as U.S. defense secretary, Leon Panetta was asked what he thought
of "Zero Dark Thirty," the movie about the intense manhunt and daring raid that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
"You know what," chuckled Panetta, who as CIA director oversaw the raid two years ago. "I lived it. It's a great movie,
but I lived it."
As he heads home to California, the 74-year-old Panetta will inevitably be remembered more as the CIA director who got bin Laden than as the Pentagon chief who oversaw shrinking defense budgets and the winding down of the Afghanistan war. But military officials and analysts say Panetta, who had decades of public service but just 19 months as defense
secretary, also left a mark on the Pentagon.
He removed barriers to women in direct combat jobs, which had limited their ability to reach the highest ranks. And he
oversaw the lifting of the ban on gays serving openly in the military.
Panetta helped fashion a U.S. defense strategy for the post-9/11 era and won military chiefs' support for $487 billion
in cuts to defense spending, all while maintaining a sense of collegiality and consensus, officials said.
Senate Republicans, who verbally browbeat Panetta's likely successor, Chuck Hagel, at his confirmation hearing, praised the outgoing defense chief, not least for trying to hold the line on even deeper budget cuts.
"Nobody was more passionate, no one was more outspoken than Leon Panetta and I am grateful," said Sen. John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, who nonetheless disagreed with his decision on gays in the military.
Revolutionary change did not mark his tenure, and some fault him for being too eager to find consensus. He leaves behind a Pentagon that is two weeks away from deeper, across-the-board spending reductions that he railed against for months.
"He is a Washington insider, a budget expert and he was an excellent caretaker for DoD during a very contentious
presidential election year where defense was in fact a relatively big issue," said Mackenzie Eaglen, a defense analyst
at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
