WASHINGTON – Donald Rumsfeld is likely to remain at the Pentagon until the spring, enabling him to to stay in the administration through the Iraqi elections and advance his plans for transforming the American military, despite strong pressure from key White House political advisers for him to leave sooner.

According to well-placed Pentagon sources, Vice President Cheney has argued the case for Mr. Rumsfeld to remain as defense secretary until at least the spring, and Mr. Cheney would prefer that Mr. Rumsfeld stayed longer.

Karl Rove and other White House advisers, however, have maintained that Mr. Rumsfeld has become a political liability and will undermine possible improvement in relations between Washington and European allies, the sources said. “The White House political shop wants him out now,” a senior Defense Department source said of Mr. Rumsfeld.

Much will depend on what happens with the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. Administration officials told The New York Sun that Ms. Rice, who spearheaded the White House’s decision a year ago to take command from the Pentagon of the American occupation of Iraq, wants to replace Mr. Rumsfeld.

Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld are old friends who served together in the Ford administration, and the vice president was instrumental in getting Mr. Rumsfeld appointed defense secretary in the first place.

The two have generally been allied in policy fights against Secretary of State Colin Powell, who, a Pentagon official says, may remain several months after Mr. Rumsfeld has departed. Earlier this week, when a reporter asked President Bush if he would like Mr. Powell to stay and lead new peace efforts in the Middle East, Mr. Bush replied: “I’m proud of my secretary of state. He’s done a heck of a good job.”

“No one is nudging Powell out at the moment,” the Pentagon official said.

“He has a lot more responsibility for what happens in Iraq in terms of reconstruction and diplomacy, and that is getting his juices flowing,” the official added.

If Ms. Rice gets the nod from the president, that will relieve pressure to create an opening for her soon at Foggy Bottom.

“She wants to move on and has made it clear that she wants to become the first woman to head the Defense Department,” a high-level Pentagon source said of Ms. Rice. The State Department already has been headed by a woman, Madeleine Albright.

Details of the behind-the-scenes tussle over who goes and who remains in Mr. Bush’s second-term Cabinet are being closely watched by the foreign policy establishment in Washington for clues as to what the president intends to do overseas in the next four years.

Indications that Mr. Rumsfeld will last less than the full year that he is said to have requested are dismaying neoconservatives outside the administration. There is fear among some key figures of Washington-based think tanks, for example, that the neoconservative approach risks losing influence in the administration.

“I hope all of this doesn’t happen, but what you are telling me is entirely plausible,” the president of the Center for Security Policy, Frank Gaffney, told the Sun.

“Rumsfeld is uniquely capable of confronting the big foreign and domestic problems, from transforming our military while fighting the global war on terrorism,” Mr. Gaffney, assistant secretary for defense in the Reagan administration and a key neoconservative hawk, said. “While Condi has done a reasonably good job at the National Security Council,” he said, “it is not the same thing as running the Pentagon, and she is not equipped as a manager, or as a person steeped in defense affairs, to run the department and handle the twin problems of the war on terror and military modernization.”

Ms. Rice, whose background is largely as an academic expert on Soviet affairs, has little experience of running a big bureaucracy. Before joining the administration she was provost of Stanford University.

If Ms. Rice does secure the Pentagon post, then there would probably be a major shakeup of the senior civilian staff there, and several neoconservative advisers brought in by Mr. Rumsfeld would be expected to leave.

Their departure would delight Democrats and would be seen by supporters of Mr. Powell as a victory for him.

The undersecretary of defense for policy, Douglas Feith, who was one of the policy architects of the pre-emptive strategy adopted by the president and used to justify the toppling of Saddam Hussein, has already told friends he will be leaving the administration.

Mr. Feith, who is the third most senior civilian at the Pentagon, has informed his Washington law firm, Feith and Zell, that he will be returning to it in the next few months, senior administration officials said.

Ms. Rice, if she is appointed to the Pentagon, is likely to give it a very different staff in terms of policy advisers and civilian officials.

“Her instincts are not Rumsfeld’s,” the Annenberg professor at the Institute of World Politics, Michael Waller, said. “At the National Security Council, she kept Clinton holdovers like Richard Clarke and favored Foreign Service career officers. The problem with that is there are few people in the council who share the president’s foreign-policy vision.”

Mr. Waller and other neoconservatives hope that in the event Ms. Rice moves to the Pentagon, one of their own will take over at the National Security Council.

The deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, a prominent neoconservative, remains high on the list of possible replacements for Ms. Rice. Few Pentagon officials believe he could remain at the Defense Department if Ms. Rice moves over.