Chuck Hagel Submits Resignation as Defense Chief Under Pressure

Washington: Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel handed in his resignation on Monday, 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.

The president was to announce the resignation from the State Dining Room of the White House around 11:15 a.m. Eastern time.

Administration officials said that Obama made the decision to remove 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 characterized the decision as a recognition that the threat from the Islamic State will require different skills from those that Hagel, who often struggled to articulate a clear viewpoint and was widely viewed as a passive defense secretary, was brought in to employ.

Hagel, a Republican and a combat veteran who was skeptical about the Iraq War, came in to manage the Afghanistan combat withdrawal and the shrinking Pentagon budget in the era of budget sequestrations.

Now, however, the US military is back on a war footing, although it is a modified one. Some 3,000 US troops are being deployed in Iraq to help the Iraqi military fight the Sunni militants of the Islamic State, even as the administration struggles to come up with, and articulate, a coherent strategy to defeat the group in both Iraq and Syria.

"The next couple of years will demand a different kind of focus," one administration official said, speaking on grounds of anonymity. He insisted that 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 Hagel's aides had maintained in recent weeks that he expected to serve the full four years as defense 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.

Even before the announcement of Hagel's removal, Obama officials were speculating on his possible replacement. At the top of the list are Michele Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defense; Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I. and a former officer with the Army's 82nd Airborne; and Ashton Carter, a former deputy secretary of defense.

A respected former senator who struck a friendship with Obama when they were both critics of the Iraq War from positions on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Hagel has nonetheless had trouble penetrating the tight team of former campaign aides and advisers who form Obama's closely knit set of loyalists. Senior administration officials have characterized him as quiet during Cabinet meetings; Hagel's defenders said that he waited until he was alone with the president before sharing his views, the better to avoid leaks.

Whatever the case, Hagel struggled to fit in with 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 criticized for seeming tentative in his responses to sharp questions.

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

In Hagel's less than two years on the job, his detractors said he struggled to inspire confidence at the Pentagon in the manner of his predecessors, especially Robert Gates. But several of Obama's top advisers over the past few months have also acknowledged privately that the president did not want another high-profile defense secretary in the mold of Gates, who went on to write a memoir of his years with Obama in which he sharply criticized the president. Hagel, they said, in many ways was exactly the kind of Defense Secretary whom the president, after battling the military during his first term, wanted.

Hagel, for his part, spent his time on the job largely carrying out Obama's stated wishes on matters like bringing back US troops from Afghanistan and trimming the Pentagon budget, with little pushback. He did manage to inspire loyalty among enlisted soldiers and often seemed at his most confident when talking to troops or sharing wartime experiences as a Vietnam veteran.

But Hagel has often had problems articulating his thoughts - or administration policy - in an effective manner, and has sometimes left reporters struggling to describe what he has said in news conferences. In his side-by-side appearances with both Dempsey and Secretary of State John Kerry, Hagel, a decorated Vietnam veteran and the first former enlisted combat soldier to be defense secretary, has often been upstaged.

He raised the ire of the White House in August as the administration was ramping up its strategy to fight the Islamic State, directly contradicting the president, who months before had likened the Sunni militant group to a junior varsity basketball squad. Hagel, facing reporters in his now-familiar role next to Dempsey, called the Islamic State an "imminent threat to every interest we have," adding, "This is beyond anything that we've seen." White House officials later said they viewed those comments as unhelpful, although the administration still appears to be struggling to define just how large is the threat posed by the Islamic State.