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Four secretaries of defense served as enlisted men before being promoted. Chuck Hagel, left, would be the only Pentagon chief to have served his entire military career as an enlisted man.

The problem is that at least four other American defense secretaries — Melvin R. Laird, Elliot L. Richardson, Caspar W. Weinberger and William J. Perry — served part of their military careers as enlisted men.

According to the Historical Office of the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Laird, who was President Richard M. Nixon's first defense secretary, entered the Navy as an enlisted man before serving as a junior officer on a destroyer in the Pacific during World War II. Mr. Richardson, who served four months as Nixon's second defense secretary, enlisted in the Army as a private in 1942. He was subsequently commissioned as an officer, and as a first lieutenant landed with the Fourth Infantry Division in Normandy on D-Day.

Mr. Weinberger, President Ronald Reagan's first secretary of defense, entered the Army as a private in 1941, was commissioned and served in the Pacific, and by the end of World War II was a captain on Gen. Douglas A. McArthur's intelligence staff.

According to biographies on the Web site of Stanford University, Mr. Perry, who was defense secretary under President Bill Clinton, served in the Army Corps of Engineers from 1946 to 1947 and was in Japan during the American occupation after World War II. He later became an officer in the Army Reserves. Today, Mr. Perry is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford.

Mr. Obama's omission of the four other defense secretaries was first reported by Robert Burns of The Associated Press.

White House officials insisted that Mr. Obama was not in error. "President Obama was precise and accurate in referring to the fact that Senator Hagel would be the 'first person of enlisted rank' to go on to serve as secretary of defense, and that experience on the front lines is part of the reason why President Obama chose him," said Marie Harf, a White House spokeswoman who is working on Mr. Hagel's nomination.

As Ms. Harf explained it, the use of the formulation "first person of enlisted rank" was meant to signal that Mr. Hagel had remained enlisted throughout his entire military career and to separate him from the other men, who had retired as officers. Mr. Hagel, who was wounded twice in Vietnam, would be the first defense secretary to have served in combat while enlisted. To Mr. Obama that distinction, at least, is crucial.

"Chuck knows that war is not a distraction," Mr. Obama said in nominating Mr. Hagel. "He understands that sending young Americans to fight and bleed in the dirt and mud, that's something we do only when it's absolutely necessary."