Buh-bye, Hagel
I’m certainly no Hagel fan. Just do a search for “Hagel” on this blog and you’ll see what I think of his competence, intelligence, and fitness for the job of Secretary of Defense.
Now Hagel has been fired—or rather, submitted a forced resignation. The spin is that he was hired during a period of downsizing and pullback, and now Obama wants get tougher on groups such as ISIS.
Perhaps, but I wonder. I really, really, really wonder. And so does Bryan Preston:
Departing Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel may have sealed his exit in this interview with Charlie Rose last week. Rose conducted the interview at the Pentagon…
Rose asked Hagel to elaborate on comments that he made in a speech at the Reagan Library last weekend. In that speech, Hagel said that America’s military capability, while still the best in the world, is being threatened.
Hagel re-iterated that to Rose, but also left viewers to wonder about the direction that President Obama is taking the military.
“I am worried about it, I am concerned about it, Chairman Dempsey is, the chiefs are, every leader of this institution,” Hagel said, including Pentagon leadership but leaving both President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden’s names out of his list of officials who are worried about the U.S. military’s declining capability. Hagel said that the Congress and the American people need to know what while the U.S. military remains the strongest, best trained and most motivated in the world, its lead is being threatened because of policies being implemented now.
Hagel went on to note that a good leader prepares their institution for future success, saying that “the main responsibility of any leader is to prepare your institution for the future. If you don’t do that, you’ve failed. I don’t care how good you are, how smart you are, any part of your job. If you don’t prepare your institution, you’ve failed.”
In the past couple of years, Hagel has warned that defense budget cuts implemented under President Obama were hurting readiness and capability. The “how smart you are” line may be a veiled shot at President Obama, who basks in a media image that he is a cerebral, professorial president…
While President Obama has downplayed the ISIS threat, even calling the group “jayvee” as it rose to power, Hagel warned last week that it is a threat unlike any other we have ever faced.
My guess is that Hagel was asked to leave by Obama because he’s not enough of a yes-man. Whether Obama’s policy is downsizing the military and pulling back from engagement with ISIS, or the opposite of both, the approaches are not really the issue. The issue is insufficient agreement with the constantly shifting sands of policy on which the leader, Obama, stands.
Soon the msm will begin blaming Hagel for the chaos in the ME and the messiah will be portrayed as a victim of poor advice.
Will the Joint Chiefs of Staff resign? They KNOW what’s going on, they took a sacred oath to defend America from ALL enemies BOTH foreign and domestic. Their resignation, en mass… with a FULL explanation, would do far more to alert the public than could any other conceivable action.
Hagel’s resignation alone is just “rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic”.
Bama don’t take no advice from no whitey! Less’n it be what he already wants to do.
The main reason for jettisoning Hagel was not his incompetence–Obama & Co. were OK with that, in fact, it suited their plans for wrecking our military establishment to have him in that position–it was the fact that he was starting to stray off the reservation in various public comments he was making.
Stand by for an even worse replacement, and an even greater sycophant and yes-man or woman.
I don’t think Hagel is a smooth enough public speaker to take veiled shots.
Hagel – a turncoat now seeking to be excused from his actions.
The Clown-In-Chief has fired every general who has worked for him.
Who is left? Who would take this position? Are there any “Yes Men” left to fill it?
Obama has eviscerated the officer ranks in our military.
It has further contributed in creating a vacuum, a hole where there should be a wealth of talent to rely upon in forming and fashioning military strategies from those rising through the rank and file vis a vis some snot-nosed, wet-behind-the-ear political puke from the administration.
I was never a Hagel fan by any means. And I think he was incompetent. I think O-boy thought he found someone who didn’t exactly like officers, and someone who’d just do his bidding. I think Hagel got in there and found he had more respect for officers than he had had as an enlisted man, and wanted to do the right thing–which was at cross purposes to O-boy’s desire to totally gut the military. How many generals had O-boy canned?
Well, Chuck, how’s that shiv from Valarie, Susan and The Anointed One feelin’, Mr. Sec’y?
Rush thinks Hagel, though a buffoon, isn’t a vicious man, and he was bucking Obama because Comrade Zero/America’s Chicken Come Home to Roost has slashed the Navy to PRE-World War ONE levels, the rest of the services to PRE-World War II levels, and even Chuck upchucked.
So the Red Queen has ordered his head struck off. Neo, you were right: these two years are going to be just a little Too Interesting.
I’m pretty much agreeing with Lee – Hagel wasn’t the sharpest knife in the bunch … but the O’Admin was just too much for him to go along with …
Boy, I hope that I live long enough to see all the tell-all, covering-my-*ss with this administration accounts to come out. I just hope that it’s not too late to recover from all the damage that they will be excusing themselves from causing.
Hagel HAD to go because of policy differences over IRAN — and nothing else.
All of the other blather is pure misdirection.
Duh!
Without a doubt, Hagel was persuaded by policy experts within the Pentagon that a nuclear Iran would be a total nightmare for the West.
BTW, Putin’s experts are giving the Iranians poisoned advice. Moscow doesn’t actually want an Iranian nuke, either. Putin does want the cash flow.
There are a million ways to go ‘off track’ with uranium enrichment. It’s obvious by the delays and tempo that many, many, things have ‘gone wrong’ with the Iranian program.
Famously, Clinton tried to provide Tehran with poisoned advice. Russian experts immediately corrected the American boob-design — a fact that too soon became public knowledge.
This event tells us that Putin has been running a program that’s too clever by more than half.
Between the blabby Internet, the power of modern personal computers, and the exposure of Manhattan project secrets during the Clinton era — we should be very, very, afraid.
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There can be no doubt that Tehran is engaged a ballistic missile program that REQUIRES implosion warheads.
Yet the MSM STILL blathers on about gun-type uranium bombs.
There is not one chance in a hundred that Tehran ever intends to construct a gun-type uranium weapon.
The 5% threshold is a complete technical dodge, too.
As ANY industrial chemist/ chemical engineer could tell you, going from 0.70% up to 5.00% constitutes 80% of the effort required to make bomb grade, highly enriched uranium, — suitable for a bomb better than Little Boy.
5.0% enrichment does make the construction of a CONVERTER REACTOR a walk in the park. At such enrichments, one does NOT need a large facility to convert U238 up into Pu239. You can stick such a converter underneath virtually ANY substantial building. No-one would ever be the wiser. The amount of equipment, manpower and material would be trivially modest.
Likewise, a deuterium converter reactor can be made trivially small.
All such weapons oriented facilities don’t need huge heat exchange dumps. They run at low specific power — quite unlike a power reactor.
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In sum: virtually EVERTHING the maladministration is pitching to the public and to foreign governments is bunkum — and obviously so.
I should think that Barry is now at the classic 6th year tyranny stage… as in going totally off the rails.
The wheels of the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round …
Barack Obama will tolerate incompetence but never opposition to his views.