The President Needs a Secretary of War

November 30, 2014

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John Nagl, a retired Army officer who served in the first two Iraq wars, is the headmaster of The Haverford School and the author of "Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice."

Chuck Hagel is a good man. He turned down a college deferment offered by his draft board to serve as an enlisted man in Vietnam, where he was wounded. He recovered, enjoying a successful business career and two terms representing Nebraska in the U.S. Senate; John McCain still calls him “Sarge.”

Obama will need a Pentagon chief who can fight grinding counterinsurgency campaigns in two theaters under the financial pressures of a congressional sequester.

For all his accomplishments, however, Hagel was not a success as the first former enlisted man to lead the Defense Department. The problem was not so much who Hagel was as who he wasn’t. Brought on to manage a downsizing Pentagon and a diminishing combat role in Afghanistan, Hagel was never a member of President Obama’s close inner circle, nor a man intended to serve as secretary of war. 

When the Islamic State took advantage of a premature American withdrawal from Iraq to seize territory the size of the state of Maryland, the president had an Iraq war of his very own to deal with. This disaster put the planned troop withdrawal from Afghanistan very much in question. Sadly, the Pentagon management skills the president needs for the final two years of his administration now look much like what he needed during the first two: fighting grinding counterinsurgency campaigns in two theaters, this time under the financial pressures of a congressional sequester.

Fortunately, two veterans of those early years in the Obama Pentagon are available to serve. The physicist Ashton Carter ran the Pentagon’s weapons acquisitions and logistics programs before becoming Leon Panetta’s deputy secretary of defense, the chief management officer of the world's biggest organization. John McHugh, a Republican congressman from New York, has been Obama's only secretary of the Army, ably managing the nation's largest armed service. Both have earned the president’s trust; either would serve ably and well in a role the president thought he no longer needed: secretary of war.