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Mr. Hagel did not speak at length about the budget on Wednesday. But, he said, the cuts are coming. "We need to deal with this reality," he told an audience in the Pentagon auditorium.

Hours after being sworn in as the 24th defense secretary, Mr. Hagel struck a folksy tone in an auditorium filled with both military and civilian Defense Department employees, with some of the military's top brass populating the front rows.

Eschewing the podium, he walked in front of the audience like a candidate at a town-hall-style meeting and played up his roots as an Army infantryman.

He called the United States a "force for good," but said that it should not dictate its agenda to the world and must strive to build alliances among countries with common interests.

Mr. Hagel, a former Republican senator from Nebraska, will be the first defense secretary in more than a decade to have to preside over deep cuts in the Pentagon's budget, which has ballooned in the years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Even if automatic budget cuts do not go into effect at the end of the week, Mr. Hagel will still have to find ways to slash billions of dollars in Defense Department spending by September.

The Senate confirmed Mr. Hagel in a 58-to-41 vote on Tuesday, with only four Republicans supporting their former colleague. It was the smallest margin for a defense secretary since the position was created in 1947, according to Senate records. He succeeds Leon E. Panetta.

It remains to be seen whether the Senate confirmation battle — during which Republican senators accused him of not being tough enough on Iran and criticized past remarks that they said made him seem insufficiently supportive of Israel — has permanently crippled his ability to negotiate the cuts with lawmakers.

Mr. Hagel said that shortly after he was sworn in he visited the Pentagon's memorial to the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks and "reflected a bit on what happened that day." Recalling a phrase once used by Winston Churchill, he called the attacks "a jarring gong" that set in motion more than a decade of war.

As a senator, Mr. Hagel became a vocal critic of the Iraq war, and during his confirmation fight he was challenged by Republican senators about his opposition to the troop "surge" ordered by President George W. Bush.

Mr. Hagel did not raise this criticism during his speech on Wednesday, saying only that American foreign policy is fallible.

"We make mistakes. We've made mistakes. We'll continue to make mistakes," he said.

Mr. Hagel referred to his combat service in Vietnam several times during his remarks, and a soldier who introduced him pointed out that Mr. Hagel "knows the costs of war."

"I'll never ask anyone to do anything I wouldn't do," Mr. Hagel said at one point during the speech.

Mr. Hagel is the first defense secretary to have served in combat as an enlisted soldier, and he said that at times he still had the mind-set of an infantryman.

He joked that while the Army's chief of staff, General Raymond T. Odierno, made him shake a bit, it was the sergeant major of the Army who "scares the hell out of me."