James Fanell rightly questioned Obama’s “pivot to Asia” strategy. A better strategy exists regarding our Navy, China, and Taiwan.
Seth Cropsey
PJ Media
11/26/2014
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s resignation under pressure from the White House is a drama largely written of Navy Captain James Fanell’s firing early in November.
Hagel told interviewer Charlie Rose in the third week of November that budget cuts are threatening American military capability. In August, Hagel said publicly that ISIL is “beyond a terrorist group. … This is beyond anything we’ve seen.” This was not welcome news to President Obama, whose cuts are on target to reduce defense budgets by well over a trillion dollars. Moreover, the president had famously downplayed ISIL as “junior varsity.”
The Obama Pentagon had welcomed China’s military as part of an annual trans-Pacific naval exercise earlier this summer. Captain Fanell, a senior intelligence officer with the U.S. Pacific Fleet, also paid with his job for stating that Chinese policy is becoming increasingly aggressive as it seeks political and military objectives in the South and East China Seas.
Put Hagel’s warnings (and those of his Obama-appointed immediate predecessors) about a hollow U.S. military together with Captain Fanell’s caution about Chinese aggression in the West Pacific, and uncomfortable questions about the substance of the U.S. “pivot to Asia” emerge…
The article continues at PJ Media.
Related: Hagel Didn’t Deserve to be Treated This Way
…Strange that these deficiencies in Hagel’s personality came as such a surprise to the president and his minions. You would think Obama would have noticed earlier if Hagel were so debilitatingly timid and tongue-tied. After all, he was selected for the job, at least in part, because of the close friendship he had supposedly formed with Obama while both men served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and were quite vigorously asserting themselves as eloquent critics of Bush administration policies.
Ah, the sudden afflictions that can seize a public official when they become their patron’s irritant or inconvenience or scapegoat…
…Though I’m sure I lacked the president’s insights into the man, I thought Hagel was the wrong candidate for the job when he was nominated. My concerns were not about his assertiveness, however. They were about his national security views, similar as they were to Obama’s, and which, as far as I could tell, he asserted regularly and forcibly…
…Hagel might have expected his departure would be explained with the minimal courtesy with which Washington typically ushers public officials off the stage — they want to spend more time with family or, having achieving notable success, it’s time for new challenges, that sort of thing. But rather than stick to such polite fictions, the mice treated him to the kind of disdain they usually reserve for their critics, not their colleagues…
