US Defence boss Hagel stepping down

NEW YORK — United States Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel handed in his resignation yesterday, the first Cabinet-level casualty of the collapse of President Barack Obama’s Democratic majority in the Senate and the struggles of his national security team to respond to an onslaught of global crises.

“Over nearly two years, Chuck has been an exemplary Defence Secretary as we modernised our budget and our strategy to face long-term threats,” Mr Obama said as he announced Mr Hagel’s resignation from the State Dining Room yesterday.

Flanked by Mr Hagel and Vice-President Joseph Biden, Mr Obama lauded Mr Hagel as “a young Army sergeant from Vietnam who rose to serve as America’s 24th Secretary of Defence”, adding that he had “been in the dirt” of combat like no other defence chief.

He said that Mr Hagel would remain in the job until his successor is confirmed by the Senate.

Administration officials said that Mr Obama made the decision to remove Mr Hagel, the sole Republican on his national security team, last Friday after a series of meetings between the two men over the past two weeks.

The officials characterised the decision as a recognition that the threat from the militant group Islamic State will require different skills from those that Mr Hagel was brought in to employ.

A Republican and decorated Vietnam veteran who was sceptical about the Iraq war, Mr Hagel came in to manage the Afghanistan combat withdrawal and the shrinking Pentagon budget in the era of budget sequestration.

But now the next couple of years will demand a different kind of focus, one administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. He insisted that Mr Hagel was not fired, saying that he initiated discussions about his future two weeks ago with the President and that the two men mutually agreed that it was time for him to leave.

But Mr Hagel’s aides had maintained in recent weeks that he expected to serve the full four years as Defence Secretary.

His removal appears to be an effort by the White House to show that it is sensitive to critics who have pointed to stumbles in the government’s early response to several national security issues, including the Ebola crisis and the threat posed by the Islamic State.

Mr John Boehner, who leads Republicans in the US House of Representatives, said yesterday that the selection for Mr Hagel’s replacement must be accompanied by a new look at US military policies.

“This personnel change must be part of a larger re-thinking of our strategy to confront the threats we face abroad, especially the threat posed by the rise of ISIL,” Mr Boehner, the House Speaker, said in a statement.

Even before the announcement, Mr Obama’s officials were speculating on his possible replacement. At the top of the list are Ms Michele Flournoy, the former Under-Secretary of Defence; Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island and a former officer with the Army’s 82nd Airborne; and Mr Ashton Carter, a former Deputy Secretary of Defence.

A respected former Senator who struck a friendship with Mr Obama when they were both critics of the Iraq war from positions on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr Hagel has nonetheless had trouble penetrating the tight team of former campaign aides and advisers who form Mr Obama’s closely knit set of loyalists.

Senior administration officials have characterised him as quiet during Cabinet meetings; Mr Hagel’s defenders said he waited until he was alone with the President before sharing his views, the better to avoid leaks.

Whatever the case, Mr Hagel struggled to fit in with Mr Obama’s close circle and was viewed as never gaining traction in the administration after a bruising confirmation fight among his old Senate colleagues, during which he was criticised for seeming tentative in his responses.

He never really shed that pall after arriving at the Pentagon and, in the past months, he has largely ceded the stage to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, who officials said initially won the confidence of Mr Obama with his recommendation of military action against the Islamic State. AGENCIES