Chuck Hagel steps down as US defense secretary

The official reason President Obama is “announcing the resignation of” (read: firing) Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, to the extent that the White House is quasi-announcing it by leaking it to the New York Times, is that Hagel has the wrong skill set to deal with ISIS. Hagel’s resignation, they told the Times, is “recognition that the threat from the Islamic State would require a different kind of skills than those that Mr. Hagel was brought on to employ.” Hagel is a dovish Republican who came on to transition the Pentagon out of war mode after the Iraq and Afghanistan wars ended; now it turns out that Obama needs a wartime secretary to take on ISIS.

That’s the official reason, but it’s not the real reason. The real reason is that Obama is trying to fix a much bigger problem: US foreign policy has been struggling throughout Obama’s second term (Hagel came on in early 2013 when that term began), and Obama has been hinting that he would replace one or two top people to try to fix it.

On Monday morning, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced that he was resigning and would stay on until a successor is in place. But who might that successor be? Here’s a guide to the top contenders — and how likely they are to nab the Pentagon’s highest office.

Who she is: Flournoy knows the Pentagon well: for most of Obama’s first term, she served as Undersecretary of Defense for policy, the third-highest job in the Pentagon. While in office, she co-chaired the Afghanistan policy review, the recommendations from which evolved into Obama’s 30,000 troop surge in the country. Before joining the White House, she co-founded the Center for a New American Security, a think tank that evolved into a major braintrust for the Obama foreign policy team.

President Obama announced the departure of Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. Here’s a a video of the announcement:

Monday morning, we learned that US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel will be resigning, apparently pushed out by the Obama administration. On Twitter, ISIS claimed responsibility — with a hashtag and an image meme.

The hashtag, translated from the Arabic, reads, “The Islamic State Topples the American Defense Minister.” There are fancy social media graphics for it and everything:

Hagel had two kinds of failures as Secretary of Defense.

The first kind are policy failures, and they’re not insignificant. In Afghanistan, Hagel failed to gain enough ground against the Taliban to force them to accept some kind of peace deal; instead, the Taliban sees itself as winning outright and is largely ignoring American negotiators. In Egypt, Hagel took the lead in trying to convince defense minister Abdel Fatah el-Sisi not to depose Egypt’s first-ever democratically elected president in a coup; Hagel failed and the coup went ahead. In Iraq and Syria, Hagel failed to devise a strategy that would prevent the rise of ISIS or that would roll it back. In Ukraine, Hagel has not contributed to the effort to roll back or deter Russia’s still-ongoing invasion. In Hagel’s defense, he is not the lead on Russia and the Afghanistan policy was failing before he took office, but ISIS and Egypt are definitely under his purview.