Chuck Hegel is out as Secretary of Defense.
Hagel is the third Sec of Defense since 2011, so his tenure, while short, is not uniquely short. Nevertheless, Hagel was apparently unable to deliver the goods. And what are “the goods” for a Secretary of Defense? Historian Hunt Tooley describes the job this way:
Though these secretaries are not the only gatekeepers of the warfare-welfare state (and perhaps not even the most important ones), they do perform a crucial function in coordinating the collectivist, rent-seeking corporate entities with the political parties and their largely social-democratic agenda.
While hardly an advocate for anti-interventionist foreign policy, the primary criticism of Hagel in Washington has always been that he is insufficiently enthusiastic about starting wars and spending lavishly on them. His critics claimed he was anti-semitic because he refused to advocate for an open ended blank check for Israel in the middle east.
Now it appears that the truly important players in US defense policy — the weapons manufacturers and financiers who benefit most from an “active” foreign policy — have gotten their way. Hagel, of course, knows that the United States is broke and relying largely on monetized debt to pay the bills. At the same time, it’s his job to keep the military bureaucrats who lobby continuously for endless spending (i.e., the “generals”) while also pleasing “private” contractors like Lockheed Martin who live fat and happy off the sweat of taxpayers.
Hagel was expected to be something of a budget “cutter,” (the DC version of “cuts” which are slight reductions in spending growth) and it was he who presided over the DoD during the final days of the sequestration debate during which the military and its private sector allies howled over tiny reductions in military growth rates. The “cuts” seemed politically necessary at the time since Hagel came into office during a transition period when there was not a clear global bogeyman for the US to use to justify unchecked government spending. Now, the generals and corporate lobbyists at Boeing, et al have breathed a sigh of relief as because the so-called Islamic State is the gift that keeps on giving and will allow the military-industrial complex to advocate for utterly unrestrained spending.
Of course, the taxpayers, who were once were fleeced to create and arm ISIS at first, will now be charged to disarm it (or so the administration says).
The landscape has greatly improved from the perspective of military spending, and Hagel can now be replaced with someone more adept at shoveling cash to powerful interest groups whom we will later be told we must thank for defending freedom.
