WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is stepping down under pressure, the first cabinet-level casualty of the collapse of President 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, who is expected to announce Mr. Hagel’s resignation in a
Rose Garden appearance on Monday, made the decision to ask his defense
secretary — the sole Republican on his national security team — to step
down last Friday after a series of meetings over the past two weeks,
senior administration officials said.
The
officials described Mr. Obama’s decision to remove Mr. Hagel, 68, as a
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. A Republican with military experience who was skeptical 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 the
defense secretary 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 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 Mr. Hagel’s removal, Obama officials were
speculating on his possible replacement. At the top of the list are
Michèle A. Flournoy, a former under secretary of defense; Senator Jack
Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island and a former officer with the Army’s 82nd
Airborne; and Ashton B. Carter, a former deputy secretary of defense.
