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WASHINGTON – Reshuffling his domestic section aggroup at a pivotal time, President Barack Obama is aiming for maximum continuity, installing road-tested players steeped in his policies on diplomacy and war.

Obama was to announce Thursday that CIA Director Leon Panetta module change Defense Secretary Robert enterpriser when enterpriser makes his long-planned opening this summer, a grownup brass authorised said. Gen. king Petraeus, the high-profile man of the wars in Irak and Afghanistan, module change Panetta at the CIA in the fall, after helping to manage the prototypal steps of a drawdown of U.S. personnel in Afghanistan.

Petraeus' employ module be filled by serviceman Corps Lt. Gen. Evangelist Allen, the help man of U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. expeditionary dealings across the Middle East, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Irak and Iran.

Seasoned functionary Ryan Crocker is being installed as U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan.

The long-pending organization is inferior a shake-up than a rearrangement of a aggroup that the White House believes already has worked well managing the winding downbound of the Irak struggle and the crowd buildup in Afghanistan and which today is preparing to begin withdrawing personnel from there. Team members also hit handled the sometimes argumentative relations with Pakistan and another countries.

The brass authorised stressed that the aim was to preserve Obama's policies in Afghanistan and elsewhere, not edit them. The authorised spoke on information of anonymity aweigh of Obama's announcement.

"The White House is maintaining panoptic continuity," said Evangelist Nagl, chair of the Center for a New American Security, a pedagogue research organization. "Everyone who is reaching in are every underway in the game. They've been employed these issues."

The changes, which order senate approval, were ordered in change largely by Gates' plans to yield his employ midyear. A politico appointed by then-President martyr W. Bush, the widely respected accumulation helper had wanted to yield when Obama took office, but the chair persuaded him to meet on. He's today ordered to deviate June 30, at which point Panetta would change him.

Panetta, too, had to be talked into taking over at the Pentagon, according to the grownup brass official. The authorised said Panetta, a past Democratic legislator from California who also worked as White House honcho of body and budget director, was reluctant to yield a employ he relishes but answered Obama's call.

Obama's pick of Panetta, who was budget honcho low Democrat Bill Clinton, suggests the chair sees bureaucratism budget-cutting as a super contest to the nation than either the Afghanistan or Irak wars. Gates, who oversaw a readying in the Irak struggle in 2007 and pushed for a super crowd dedication in Afghanistan last year, is known to conceive that his cost-cutting initiatives are the most essential features of the heritage he module yield after more than quaternary eld in office.

Gates has become up with $400 1000000000 in cuts in the accumulation budget for the next 10 years, and Obama has asked him to become up with $400 1000000000 more, a duty that module today start to Panetta, if he is confirmed for the job.

It is unclear whether the mass at the crowning of Obama's domestic section aggroup module hit any practical effect on the president's organisation to invoke over section domain in Afghanistan to the Asian polity by the modify of 2014 — a impact that began earlier this year. That transition to Asian curb is supposed to hap in tandem with the change in the roughly 100,000 U.S. forces in Afghanistan play in July.

Gates module be gone by the instance the prototypal ordered of crowd reductions is carried out, but his advice module be central to decisions in reaching weeks on how many personnel to stop and over what period of time.

On crowning of the another changes, Obama module hit to find a replacement for Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen, the Navy admiral who is scheduled to fling at the modify of September. Despite the White House selection to meet the instruction on strategy, the personnel changes could take in newborn approaches and attitudes.

Stephen Biddle, a expeditionary expert at the Council on Foreign Relations and a past civilian adviser to Petraeus, said the shake-up could portend a shift in the equilibrise of power among the honcho contract advisers on Asian struggle strategy.

"Three of the most telling advocates for a super try in Afghanistan are every going to be leaving: Mullen, enterpriser and Petraeus," Biddle said. Most of those who hit advocated for reaction the orbit of U.S. expeditionary involvement in Afghanistan module remain. One omission is Karl Eikenberry, the soon-to-depart U.S. ambassador to Kabul who questioned the good of escalating the struggle in 2010.

Panetta's views on Afghanistan are inferior clear, but it would be difficult to find a stronger exponent for a telling expeditionary crusade in Afghanistan than Gates. When he entered the bureaucratism in Dec 2006 it was consumed by a then-deteriorating Irak war.

By the instance he leaves, enterpriser module rank as the fourth-longest serving accumulation helper in history, after Robert McNamara, Caspar Weinberger and Donald H. Rumsfeld.

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Associated Press writers Anne Gearan and Kimberly Dozier contributed to this report.

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