Pentagon in Back Seat as Kerry Leads Charge

From The New York Times:

In the weeks of sometimes bewildering debate in Washington about what to do in Syria, one truth has emerged: President Obama has transformed his relationship with the Pentagon and the military.

The civilian policy makers and generals who led Mr. Obama toward a troop escalation in Afghanistan during his first year in office, a decision that left him deeply distrustful of senior military leaders, have been replaced by a handpicked leadership that includes Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Through battlefield experience — Mr. Hagel as an infantryman in 1967 and 1968 in Vietnam, and General Dempsey as a commander during some of the most violent years in Iraq — both men share Mr. Obama’s reluctance to use American military might overseas. A dozen years after the Pentagon under Donald H. Rumsfeld began aggressively driving national security policy, the two have wholeheartedly endorsed a more restricted Pentagon role.

“Hagel was not hired to be a ‘secretary of war,’ ” said one senior Defense Department official. “That is not a mantle the president wants him to wear.”

The crisis in Syria is the most recent and most powerful example of how Mr. Obama, elected twice on a promise to disengage the United States from overseas conflicts, has moved the Pentagon to a back seat. In this case, it is Secretary of State John Kerry who is leading the charge, not the far less vocal Mr. Hagel and General Dempsey.

 

Even some senior administration officials, in private conversations and in e-mails, have sniped at Mr. Hagel and General Dempsey, saying that their reserved demeanor undercut the administration’s arguments for action in Syria.

In one exchange before Congress, General Dempsey said that an American strike on Syria would be “an act of war,” prompting a rebuttal from Mr. Kerry, who said the options were nothing like the huge mobilizations and lengthy deployments of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Both statements were accurate, but the points of view reflected different assessments of the risks and benefits of intervention by the Pentagon and the State Department.

“Whether you call it a reset of the Pentagon or a reflection of what our overall policy is,” the Pentagon official said, “the military instrument is not going to be the dominant instrument of our policy, particularly in an instance like Syria, where we are not looking at military force to solve the underlying civil war.”

Senior aides to Mr. Hagel and General Dempsey say that the two have offered blunt advice on Syria, and that both support, as would be expected, the president’s goal of having ready a limited military strike aimed at stopping the Syrian government from using chemical weapons.

But neither is the chief advocate for military action. The drum major for intervention is instead Mr. Kerry, who also served in Vietnam, and who has eclipsed Mr. Hagel and General Dempsey in public passion and in minutes at the microphone during Congressional hearings. (If negotiations to neuter Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile founder and the president orders military action, Mr. Hagel and General Dempsey will assume the role of administration spokesmen on the mission.)