Hagel leaves, What gives?

So, less than two years into the job, Chuck Hagel is out.  President Obama will be searching for his fourth defense secretary in six years.  And the familiar Washington parlor game of finger pointing—was Hagel pushed out; did the administration lose confidence in his ability to manage a vast Defense Department bureaucracy?; was Hagel frustrated with the White House—erupted only hours after the announcement. 

The news of Hagel’s resignation caught nearly everyone in Washington off-guard.  While there were always rumors of a vast White House-Pentagon rift on certain aspects of U.S. national security policy, nobody expected the rift was so deep and so damaging that it would result in the departure of the Pentagon’s top civilian official.  Granted, we still do not know the full story; The New York Times, which first broke the story, reported that Hagel and White House officials were involved in discussions about a possible change weeks before the announcement was made.  But regardless of the mechanics of the talks that took place behind closed doors, the departure of Obama’s fourth Secretary of Defense comes at a time when U.S. military forces are engaged in a third war in Iraq and in the middle of a transition to the Asia-Pacific region—all under the dark cloud of sequestration that is putting a divot into the Pentagon’s acquisition, modernization, and research and development plans.  

{mosads}We may never know why Hagel—a former Army sergeant who served in the Vietnam War, and the first enlisted combat soldier to become Defense Secretary—called it quits.  Unless Hagel decides to write a tell-all memoir, all of the commentators outside of Washington are confined to making educated guesses about his motives.  So, at risk of piling on, here are several issues—all of which are serious national security issues that at times pitted the White House and the Pentagon bureaucracy against one another—that may have led Hagel to leave. 

Syria/ISIL: The bloody civil war in Syria, the rise of the Islamic State as a terrorist-turned-insurgent movement, and the U.S. role in it is by far the most urgent foreign policy priority that the White House and Defense Department have on their plates.  The deployment of over 3,000 U.S. advisers to Iraq, over 900 airstrikes against ISIL targets in Iraq and Syria, and a request for an additional $5.6 billion for the anti-ISIL campaign illustrates just how serious the administration is to rolling back ISIL and building up the capacity of the Iraqi security forces to tackle the threat on their own. 

Yet collective urgency does not at all mean that the Pentagon and the White House saw eye-to-eye on strategy.  Weeks before Hagel’s resignation, there were credible reports pointing to a vast disagreement between the National Security Council and the Defense Secretary’s office about how to prosecute the conflict and refine the strategy that would guide the war.  In October of this year, Secretary Hagel wrote a blunt and scathing memo to National Security Adviser Susan Rice “expressing concern about overall Syria strategy,” and what was described as the administration’s lack of commitment in forcing Syria’s Bashar al-Assad out (I wrote a piece about this in The National Interest this month).  Hagel’s more alarming rhetoric towards the threat posed by ISIL (“they are an imminent threat to every interest we have,”) simply didn’t appear to square with the president’s strategy to defeat the organization—which, to date, has been incremental and selective over the first three months of the campaign.  

Hagel, of course, was a key figure in this strategy, and he publicly supported the war plan.  Yet there may have been more apprehension behind closed doors, which is not at all surprising. 

White House centralization:  Every White House would like to completely control U.S. foreign policy and the messaging that is attached to that policy.  The Obama White House, however, appears to be much more of a control-freak on these matters than its predecessors—a fact that has been acknowledged by former Obama cabinet officials like Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, and Leon Panetta.  

According to all three of these Washington veterans, Obama’s National Security Council is where the action is and the power resides.  Cabinet secretaries are either marginalized from the inter-agency debate or overruled by a trusted team of senior advisers in the White House that have been with President Obama since his days as a junior senator running for president in 2008.  Hagel’s two predecessors, Gates and Panetta, were particularly adamant about this in their memoirs, and the griping has only gotten louder. 

Chuck Hagel was “very, very frustrated,” during his time as Obama’s Defense Secretary, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) claimed a few hours after the resignation was made public.  “It was a job he was given where he never was really brought in to that real tight circle inside the White House that makes all the decisions…”  If this is in fact the case, then Hagel may have come to the conclusion that leaving was less of a burden than sticking around.  

Sequestration: The automatic and arbitrary spending cuts that have been a way of life for the Pentagon over the past several years is a major concern to nearly every U.S. policymaker in the country.  Everyone understands that something needs to be done about sequestration, but they aren’t sure exactly how to lift it in a way that would pass in a bipartisan way.  Although Secretary Hagel was far less vocal on this subject than his military counterpart, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey, one anonymous Senate aide has said that Hagel eventually grew disillusioned with the White House’s position on the spending cuts. 

“Hagel has been pushing back on the administration in regards to the defense budget and some of the defense policy,” the senate aide told Politico, “and that’s kind of what led to this.”  

Realistically, one quote from one anonymous source should be taken with a grain of salt and viewed at a distance.  But it does open the door to another factor as to why Hagel decided to move on: he could have come to a judgment that a declining budget is simply a fact of life at the Pentagon over the next two years of the Obama presidency (and a perpetually gridlocked Congress), and that no one outside of the department is serious about getting rid of it.

DePetris is an analyst for Wikistrat, Inc., a geopolitical consultancy firm, and a contributor to The National Interest.