Chuck Hagel was a huge mistake
Or was the entire war policy, plans and assumptions
a mis-fire over time…
He was the wrong man to lead the Pentagon in a new direction, theoretically the right man, *until the direction changed and that is the real story. "He wasn't up to the job.” That one sentence from an anonymous White House official is the final verdict on Chuck Hagel, who by all appearances is being shoved out of his post as secretary of Defense.
It was perhaps his sad destiny all along to leave the administration in the most humiliating way possible, since he joined it in similar fashion, winning confirmation only after he was bludgeoned to near-death by his former Republican colleagues in the Senate. McCain repeatedly savaged Hagel over his opposition to the 2007 Iraq troop surge, which Hagel had previously described as "the most dangerous foreign policy blunder since Vietnam.”
Credit to Congress’s greatest HAWK Sen. McCain who see’s what many see, and that is when it comes to affairs of the Middle East, he who shows a weak hand loses. On that other hand for anything to work in the middle East you have to be there and the withdrawals of our troops because the American public is getting sick of war left a vacuum today being filled by IRAN. The Hawks, many in Congress with military procurement, purchasing, manufacturing, supplies and military presence in their districts…must think war is cool.
RULE ONE : When you deal with fourth century ideology, you need to use fourth century tactics. The Middle East lives by power. He who has the power rules, simple. We were pulling out, and even though everyone knowledgeable about the Middle East warned about the void, that it will be filled by someone else, the top echelon more interested in a created peace, overlooked and under acknowledged the enemy. The birth or afterbirth of ISIL, ISIS or those bad guys in IRAN, on the JV team.
He was, in other words, a dove with a national security pedigree, which made him seem like the right choice to lead the Pentagon as the administration drew down from Iraq and Afghanistan and tried to rein in the military's insanely bloated budget. We were going to see peace in the middle east. Never happen.
INSANE ? JUST FROM A BUDGET STANDPOINT, YES
If the budget was bad before, equipping the ISIS with the latest and greatest tools we gave the IRAQI quitters had to place some red ink in the black column and they probably had to order cases of red ink to keep up.
Adding to that, besides clobbering the Toyota and Nissan armed pickup trucks we have to take out, we have bomb our own Hum Vees, Abrams / Bradley tanks, heavy duty fuel / supply trucks and other tactical assets besides some ground to air assets that ISIL has obtained with an Iraqi credit card.
Sooner or later we will run out of the leftover WWII 500 LB dumb bombs, re-fitted with the JDAM add-ons. It is not a stand-alone weapon, rather it is a "bolt-on" guidance package that converts unguided gravity bombs into Precision-Guided Munitions, or PGMs. The key components of the system consist of a tail section with aerodynamic control surfaces, a (body) strake kit, and a combined inertial guidance system and GPS guidance control unit. Think of it as a Garmin on steroids.
The JDAM was meant to improve upon laser-guided bomb and imaging infrared technology, which can be hindered by bad ground and weather conditions. Laser seekers are now being fitted to some JDAMs. From 1998 to August 20, 2013, Boeing delivered 250,000 JDAM kits, producing over 40 guidance kits per day. JDAM bombs are inexpensive compared to alternatives such as cruise missiles. The original cost estimate was $40,000 each for the tail kits; however, after competitive bidding, contracts were signed with McDonnell Douglas (later Boeing) for delivery at $18,000 each plus the bomb plus whatever an Abrams is worth when hit. New build on an Abrams is about 3 million… or more.
From beginning to end, it was clear that Hagel was the wrong man at the wrong time to lead the Pentagon, though not for reasons that his critics claim, namely that he is too dovish to lead the world's largest military at a time of enormous instability in the Middle East.
Whoa! He served as an embodiment of the Obama administration's foreign policy goals, a blunder of humongous sorts, and missed clues, several incidental upheavals like the ARAB spring which became the ARAB Winter, and it sprang/sprung in five countries, the rise of ISIS or ISIL, the rebirth of Al Qaeda, suddenly we went from basketball to football and the team leader is six three and 160 pounds. Right man, but the job changed. Now we need a 300lb. offensive tackle since the peace initiatives failed miserably.
HAGEL IS A GOOD GUY, THE GAME CHANGED
In a superficial sense, Hagel ticked a lot of boxes for the administration. He won two Purple Hearts in Vietnam and the senator from Nebraska, he made his name in debates over foreign policy. He is technically a Republican. He did oppose the Iraq War and generally advocated for a liberal foreign policy; He encouraged engagement with Iran; ( Now they are helping the Iraqis) He was a forceful critic of Israel. (Over the settlements) He had called the powerful Israeli lobby the "Jewish lobby," a phrase that carries the whiff of bigotry; He had opposed sanctions on Iran that Obama strongly supported. He had said the Iranian government was “legitimate”; He had endorsed a "unilateral" disarmament of nuclear weapons; He advocated for nuclear disarmament.
RIGHT ON: Hagel was forced to renounce nearly all of them during his confirmation. He went so far as to say that he wished he could "go back and edit that, like many of the things I've said, I would like to change the words and the meaning.” This gap between Hagel and the White House was crystallized by Hagel's statement during the hearing that the administration's goal was to "contain" Iran, which it wasn't.
Hagel never recovered from those hearings. His credibility was shot. He has been largely invisible these past two years, his sad plight captured in this one anecdote from a New York Times article in October: Mr. Hagel has a different problem. Mr. Hagel says little in policy meetings and has largely ceded the stage to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, who officials said has won the confidence of Mr. Obama with his recommendations of military action against the Islamic State.
MORE FROM SIMILAR ARTICLES
Defenders of Mr. Hagel attribute his reticence in meetings to fears that the details will leak into the news media, and say he is more vocal in one-on-one sessions with the president. [The New York Times] So the guy who was brought in to reform the Defense Department, who was expected to lead America in a new direction after a decade of fruitless war, who was supposed to stand up to the hawks in the military, let the head of the armed forces dictate the terms of the debate within the White House because he was scared of a few leaks? President Obama, and those who want a saner foreign policy, can do better.
But what's clear is that by the end of his tenure he had been eclipsed by the military, whose clout has only risen in recent months. Here's the report from Helene Cooper at The New York Times: In the past 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 Mr. Obama with his recommendation of military action against the Islamic State. [The New York Times]
That points to the broader problem with Hagel. He no longer fit in an administration that has fallen back on the default setting for American foreign policy: endless war. Hagel was selected to head the Pentagon for the same reason that President Obama was originally elected: He bluntly recognized the failure of the Iraq War. He was supposed to be the guy who managed the end of major wars and placed America's military on a less aggressive footing. Instead, the administration has found itself unable to extract the military from the mires George W. Bush left in the Islamic world.
Iraq War III: Now Including Syria which is still illegal, by the way is already a fiasco. The CIA is deeply involved in arming and training only-God-knows-who, even though a historical review by the agency concluded that arming rebels almost never works. Meanwhile, the U.S. military is stuck arming and training an Iraqi army that evaporated in the face of ISIS despite being given hundreds of millions of dollars by the American taxpayer, and that is probably way too corrupt to ever stand up on its own.
The U.S. is also sticking around Afghanistan, despite the fact that the Obama administration has been planning to end the U.S. presence there for years now. Troop deployments are scheduled to fall to about 10,000 or so by the end of this year, when U.S. forces were supposed to move to noncombat roles. Britain packed up and left last month. But over the past week or two, the administration has announced what amounts to a major military re-commitment to that conflict.
The new rules of engagement will allow the Pentagon to authorize combat, including air strikes, under many different circumstances. Nighttime raids, hated by Afghan civilians, are back in play. The reduction in troop levels is also in question, with Obama announcing that forces will be beefed up by 4,000 for the moment, due to the worsening insurgency.
With the U.S. shifting back to a war footing, Hagel's input was apparently no longer needed.
The question, as always, is how long America is willing to keep this up. The war in Afghanistan alone is already projected to cost $4 trillion. The Taliban, sensing U.S. exhaustion, have been conducting aggressive operations for months now and secured some major victories. Does anyone think the latest policies are going to make a difference? The U.S. is caught in a trap. It can't withdraw from these countries without them falling to pieces. It can't achieve anything of lasting significance, either. A frank admission of the limits of American power is just something we can't handle as a nation — and so Hagel had to go.
The problems he was hired to face are doing better than ever… and Washington never blames itself...