Chuck Hagel resigned as US defense secretary on Monday morning, and the Obama administration must be ecstatic that the Washington press is agrip with the perennial Beltway question: “Was he fired or did he quit?!”

After yet another weekend of news that the administration is expanding its war footing in the Middle East in secret, the White House yet again is exercising its power to avoid talking about what should be on the tip of the tongue of everyone: How are more troops going to solve a problem that 13 years of war have only made worse?

With Hagel’s resignation, hardly anyone is talking about the alarming story published Friday night by the New York Times, reporting that President Obama has ordered – in secret – that troops continue the Afghanistan War at least through 2015 ... after announcing to the public months ago that combat operations would stop at the end of this year. Obama made his “This year we will bring America’s longest war to a responsible end” statement in the White House Rose Garden, on television, six months ago. The extension of the Afghan war was reportedly executed by a classified order.

Meanwhile, Obama was up there smiling next to Hagel on Monday, talking about how “reluctant” he is to see him go. The American president, like the one before him, is apparently reluctant to be upfront with the public about war.

Shorter Obama: Hagel was brought in to make peace. So I'm going to fire him now. http://t.co/i4NDcBRPV3 — emptywheel (@emptywheel) November 24, 2014

On Sunday, the New York Times also reported that the new Afghan president quietly lifted the ban on so-called “night raids,” clearing the way for them to once again be conducted in conjunction with American special forces. (Continuing its penchant for News Speak, the US military has reportedly renamed them “night operations” in light of how much they are hated by Afghans.)

While Hagel’s departure has already been framed around the Obama administration needing a “change” after the midterm elections, or as a scapegoat for the administration’s response to the Islamic State (Isis), but that just raises more questions than answers: Why does the Obama administration think removing the only Republican from its cabinet will satisfy an electorate that just voted in more Republicans? And how is firing Chuck Hagel supposed to be a magic wand for a faltering campaign to destroy Isis?

Gen. John Kelly says war with ISIS will last many decades: "No one in this room will be alive at the end of this war." #HISF2014 — John Hudson (@John_Hudson) November 22, 2014

Taken with the Afghanistan news, as Marcy Wheeler points out, it’s clear that Obama’s White House wants to slot in someone who’s a lot more gung-ho about war. Hagel, a Vietnam veteran who was long skeptical of the Iraq conflict, entered office “to manage the Afghanistan combat withdrawal and the shrinking Pentagon budget in the era of budget sequestration,” as the Times’s Helene Cooper described.

But “the next couple of years will demand a different kind of focus,” an unnamed official told the Times, apparently unwilling to articulate the obvious: Obama wants the primary focus of his (and perhaps Hillary Clinton’s) next defense secretary to be ramping up troops and once again expanding the Pentagon’s almost limitless budget.

That’s not to say Hagel was an anti-war voice over the past two years when it came to Syria, Isis, or the drone wars – he wasn’t. He was just as hyperbolic as anyone in the administration about ISIS, and was “ready to go” for war against Bashir al-Assad in Syria in 2013. It just sounds like the administration thought he wasn’t sufficiently excited about conducting mulitple wars that will last for the next decade.

Hagel’s replacement remains an open question, but one thing’s for sure: it’ll be someone pushing for more war, not less. Former Pentagon official Michele Flournoy’s name was floated by the most people Monday morning. Flournoy, a favorite of defense contractors, has seemingly never met a military intervention she didn’t like – and that didn’t require more troops. As The Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman wrote of Hagel’s possible successors:

Flournoy had been one of the defense intellectuals most closely allied with counter-insurgency. As one of the founders of the Center for a New American Security thinktank (CNAS), she promoted the 2007-era Iraq troop surge and, once installed as undersecretary of defense for policy, parlayed that advocacy into urging another troop surge in Afghanistan, intended to cleave Afghans from support for the Taliban.

Which is depressing for anyone who wants answers and honest policy:

What Obama needs most at DoD is someone to question the conv. wisdom that drives US nat sec policy. But he won't pick anyone like that. — Stephen Walt (@stephenWalt) November 24, 2014

The United States is almost five months into the multi-country war against Isis, still with no legal authority to do so, and now we can look forward to Congress questioning the next Pentagon chief on whether he or she is sufficiently willing to continue bombing, while the real question gets left unanswered: we still have no idea how the next 13 years of Forever War will be different than the first.