Hagel’s Departure Bears Little Likeness to Rumsfeld’s Removal

WASHINGTON — With his party in a shambles after a disastrous midterm election and his administration ensnared in a messy war in the Middle East, the president stood in the East Room and showed his defense secretary the door.

History seemed to repeat itself this week when President Obama dismissed Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, much as President George W. Bush sacked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld eight years ago this month. But beyond the eerie echo, Mr. Hagel’s removal bears little resemblance to that of Mr. Rumsfeld.

The ouster of Mr. Rumsfeld signaled a fundamental change of thinking about the United States’ war strategy and a profound shift in power inside Mr. Bush’s administration as it came to the end of its sixth year. The departure of Mr. Hagel, on the other hand, augurs no such pivot for the Obama administration and seems to cement the current approach to national security.

Mr. Hagel fell short in the president’s eyes because he was passive and quiet in Situation Room deliberations, hardly the commanding figure needed when the country is in a new war against Islamic extremists in Iraq and Syria. To the White House, he seemed a captive of the generals and not in sync with the president’s team.

“The clear suggestion is that the White House does indeed still want a doormat — Hagel just forgot whose doormat he was supposed to be,” said Rosa Brooks, a former Obama administration official at the Pentagon. “So it’s sure looking like this move presages a White House doubling down on existing ways of doing business, not a White House interested in making real changes.”

Others pointed to Mr. Hagel’s pushback on budget cuts and a recent memo he wrote criticizing the White House strategy for Syria. “With Hagel, President Obama is firing the guy who wants to change the policy,” said Stephen Biddle of George Washington University, who advised Mr. Bush’s White House on Iraq strategy. “With Rumsfeld, Bush was firing the guy who had opposed changing the policy and was widely seen as a barrier to new thinking.

“So whereas the Rumsfeld firing cleared the way for a policy reversal,” he added, “the Hagel firing appears to be reinforcing a continuation of the pre-existing strategy by removing one of its critics.”

Presidents have long struggled to find the right civilians or generals to manage the armed forces. James Madison’s secretary of war during the War of 1812 proved so ineffectual that Madison had his secretary of state, James Monroe, take over and essentially do both jobs. Abraham Lincoln fired a series of generals during the Civil War until finding Ulysses S. Grant. Andrew Johnson fired his war secretary, Edwin Stanton, over Reconstruction policy, triggering the first impeachment of a president.

After World War II broke out in Europe, Franklin D. Roosevelt forced out his secretary of war, Harry Woodring, an opponent of intervention, and replaced him with Henry Stimson, who had already served as war secretary and secretary of state. Robert McNamara resigned under pressure when he turned on Lyndon B. Johnson’s handling of Vietnam. Gerald R. Ford fired James Schlesinger, whom he found aloof and arrogant. And Bill Clinton eased out Les Aspin in less than a year after concluding he was indecisive.

Mr. Rumsfeld was a complicated figure in the Bush administration, admired by many for his decisive if sometimes brusque leadership yet a lightning rod for criticism from top generals, lawmakers and other senior officials. Some advisers had been urging Mr. Bush to fire him after his re-election in 2004, but the president bristled at what he saw as giving in to the chattering class.

By 2006, as the war in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Bush finally changed his mind and dismissed Mr. Rumsfeld the day after midterm elections that handed control of both houses of Congress to the opposition Democrats. Republican senators were furious with Mr. Bush for waiting until after the voting, reasoning that if he had acted before the election, it might have saved their majority.

At the time, Mr. Rumsfeld championed a strategy of transferring control of the war to Iraqi forces and gradually pulling out American troops. In dismissing Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Bush turned in the opposite direction, sending more American forces and assigning them to the front lines to protect the Iraqi civilian population from militias and extremists. Mr. Rumsfeld’s departure also accelerated the decline of the influence of Vice President Dick Cheney’s wing of the administration.

Mr. Hagel never had a wing, nor did he play the outsize role in administration debates or figure in the midterm election contests. He was not the architect of the policies that have been at the heart of Mr. Obama’s troubles overseas.

He was Mr. Obama’s third defense secretary and, like his two predecessors, Robert M. Gates and Leon E. Panetta, had a sometimes rocky relationship with White House aides. In recent months, as Mr. Obama opened a new military campaign in Iraq and Syria, he relied more and more on Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Eric S. Edelman, a former under secretary of defense under Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Gates, said the Hagel episode highlighted confusion about Mr. Obama’s policies, centralization of power in the White House and a disregard or distrust of the Pentagon among the president’s advisers.

“They wanted a tame and compliant SecDef, and they got one,” he said, using the military’s term for secretary of defense. “But apparently over time he became less pliant and started to push for more resources and perhaps had other differences.”

Douglas B. Wilson, an assistant defense secretary under both Mr. Gates and Mr. Panetta, said the contrast between Mr. Hagel and Mr. Rumsfeld was strong. “With Rumsfeld, you had someone who started out as Yoda and ended up as Darth Vader,” he said. “He walked on water after 9/11, and they wanted to drown him after he completely rejected military advice regarding what it would take to go into Iraq.”

“But I think that is absolutely not the case with Hagel,” Mr. Wilson added. “What you have here is Gulliver and Lilliput. This is a guy who wanders in and has been hamstrung by almost everything. He’s not a giant, good or bad. He never found his footing.”