President Barack Obama hugs Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel after Hagel announced his resignation on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014 at the White House. (Olivier Douliery, Abaca Press/TNS)
WASHINGTON — Earlier this month, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel sat next to Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey as the general testified to a House panel that he was considering ground troops in Iraq.
Dempsey had been pushing the envelope on the war for months. But when Hagel was questioned by lawmakers, he repeated the Obama administration refrain, saying, “U.S. military personnel will not be engaged in a ground combat mission.”
Up until his resignation announcement Monday, Hagel was a loyal backer of the administration and its military foreign policy, even when it conflicted with the views of top brass. Still, toeing the line was not enough to overcome what some saw as a lackluster tenure at the Pentagon and growing post-election pressure on the White House to shake up staff and refresh its war effort.
“I never had the sense that anybody in the department felt the buck stopped with Hagel,” said Gordon Adams, a professor of foreign policy at American University in Washington.
President Barack Obama made the official announcement of Hagel’s resignation Monday, saying the secretary had approached him about leaving last month. Hagel agreed to stay on until a successor is confirmed by the Senate.
The former Republican senator and Vietnam War veteran seemed to stumble at times during his confirmation hearing in January 2013, and never settled into a strong leadership role in the Pentagon in the nearly two years that followed.
Adams said Dempsey and other military leaders often made headlines by stepping out of sync with Hagel and the White House, increasing the perception that he was not in command of the nation’s largest federal department.
“A lot of people thought he was unfit for the job from the beginning, kind of rubber-stamping the Obama administration’s foreign policy,” said Diem Nguyen Salmon, a senior policy analyst for defense budgeting at the Heritage Foundation.
That became more pronounced in recent months as the nation plunged into a new war and the administration struggled to articulate its military strategy to Congress and the public. It left Hagel, not known as a great communicator, with a tough job — explaining strategy and goals for the war against the Islamic State that were increasingly criticized as ill-defined.
The troubles at the Pentagon came to a head during midterm elections this month. Salmon said rumors of Hagel’s departure began circulating in Washington in the weeks after the administration took an electoral beating and lost majority control in the Senate.
The elections featured images of Islamist militants in TV campaign ads and candidates cast dire warnings about a new terrorism threat. They were a stinging loss for Democrats, partly seen as a referendum on Obama’s military policy in Iraq and Syria.
In the days after, the White House likely looked at Hagel and his underwhelming tenure at the Pentagon as an opportunity to make a change in leadership and show an uncertain public it was taking concerns over the war seriously, Salmon said.
Despite his loyalty, Hagel had become the most visible weak link in the administration’s foreign policy team.
“I think that that could absolutely be the case — that they used him as a scapegoat,” Salmon said.
Still, despite public appearances, it appeared Hagel was privately frustrated with the White House and its war strategy well before the election. A leaked memo written by the defense secretary last month to National Security Advisor Susan Rice criticized its approach to dealing with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has waged a bloody civil war against moderate rebels the U.S. hopes to train against the Islamic State but who has remained largely in the periphery of the war strategy.
Sen. John McCain, R- Ariz., said that his former colleague on Capitol Hill had told him he was unhappy with the White House, which has been accused of micromanaging defense issues by former defense secretaries Robert Gates and Leon Panetta.
“I know that Chuck was frustrated with aspects of the administration’s national security policy and decision-making process,” McCain said in a written statement.
Hagel is the third defense secretary to leave during the Obama presidency.
So far, it remains unclear what the administration wants in Hagel’s replacement, who will likely be confirmed with a new GOP majority in the Senate next year.
Michele Flournoy, a former under secretary of defense, and Ashton Carter, former deputy defense secretary, were both top candidates for the position in the past and their names have again surfaced.
Flournoy, a liberal defense hawk who founded and now runs a Washington think tank, was the top military policy adviser to Hagel’s predecessor Leon Panetta when she served as policy under secretary from 2009 until 2012. Her support of a muscular foreign policy and military intervention, as well as an opposition to mandatory defense budget caps under sequestration, could contrast with Hagel, who was appointed to manage a shrinking military and the winding down of two long wars.
Carter is a long-time Pentagon hand who was the second in charge, running day-to-day operations until he was passed over for defense secretary when Obama chose Hagel and left the DOD in 2013.
Mike O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the White House may be looking for bold new ideas to refresh military foreign policy — but there are other indications it considered Hagel too assertive in private.
“We are all just trying to make sense of contradictory rumors,” O’Hanlon said. “The administration is just going to have to clarify.”
