Michele Flournoy, a former Pentagon policy chief, could become the first woman to serve in the role as Senate Democrat Jack Reed says he does not want the job

Six years after first signing on to the Obama-era Pentagon, Michele Flournoy’s moment may be approaching.



Flournoy, who came into the Obama administration as the Pentagon’s policy chief in 2009, has a chance at becoming the first woman to serve as US defense secretary now that Chuck Hagel has been sacked.

She is already among a list of leading successors to Hagel that also includes Senator Jack Reed, and former deputy secretary Ashton Carter. Other possible candidates to run the Pentagon, after their own earlier departures from the administration, include former deputy secretary John Hamre and former navy secretary Richard Danzig. Current deputy secretary Robert Work also has strong internal Pentagon backing.

Complicating any potential new defense secretary is a calculation among Democratic defense notables: whether to be Obama’s final Pentagon chief or to hold out to run the Pentagon for the next Democratic president, such as expected candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Few defense observers thought Flournoy’s late 2011 departure from the Pentagon heralded the abandonment of her ambition to be secretary, even after Obama passed her over twice in favor of Hagel and Leon Panetta. Yet Flournoy’s departure came as the Obama administration had abandoned the issue with which she was most closely identified: counter-insurgency in Afghanistan.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Former deputy secretary of defense Ashton Carter. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

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.

Barack Obama signed on to the approach, but it cost counterinsurgents the trust of the White House, which under Obama has consolidated authority over foreign and defense policy. Obama and his aides felt cornered by the military into embracing a strategy heavy on troops and ultimately light on results. Soon after Flournoy left the Pentagon, Obama and the defense chiefs unveiled a new defense approach that formally abandoned conducting “large-scale, prolonged stability operations.”

Over the weekend, Obama quietly decided to relax the restrictions on US combat in Afghanistan next year, informally abandoning his oft-repeated pledge to end US major US involvement in the war in 2014 – a pledge that was supposed to reap the result of counterinsurgency successes.

After leaving the administration, Flournoy returned to CNAS as its chief executive officer, which many saw as preparation for another senior defense post. Her public statements after leaving office tend to focus on improving internal bureaucratic processes and generic statements of support for administration priorities, rarely drifting into significant criticism. The exception has been her support for greater military spending, something the White House, backed by the past three defense secretaries, have sought to constrain.

Whatever lingering acrimony exists over counter-insurgency between Flournoy and Obama’s top White House aides, Flournoy still enjoys a substantial base of support among senior generals and admirals across the services, something Hagel never enjoyed and Panetta had to build. Her appointment to defense secretary would immediately be seen as an indication that a revised US approach against the Islamic State (Isis) was in the offing, likely featuring the erosion of existing restrictions on US combat.

It is a wild card for the White House: Flournoy could help the White House translate its policy preferences to a skeptical Pentagon; but to contradict Flournoy would risk further alienating officers who desire clearer decisions from Obama than those he has thus far offered.

More reliable is Reed. The senator, a figure who inspires little controversy, is a senior Democratic member of the Senate armed services committee, who often plays the role of administration defender during controversial hearings. After Obama’s September speech announcing the expansion of US air strikes into Syria, Reed praised it, while declaring himself “skeptical of deeper military involvement that could lead to an open-ended conflict.” Reed’s spokesman on Monday insisted the senator did not want the job.

Legislators tapped to run the Pentagon have often found themselves chewed up by its complex bureaucracy, like Hagel and his Clinton-era predecessor Les Aspin, which helps explain Ashton Carter’s appeal. A former acquisitions under-secretary, Carter won praise from Congress for attempting a still-unfinished revamp of Pentagon purchasing authorities, as well as running the Pentagon on a day-to-day basis as Panetta’s deputy.

Carter resigned in 2013 after months of aiding Hagel’s transition, and returned to the Harvard faculty that has long nurtured him, teaching science and international affairs. He is a bona fide nuclear weapons expert and amongst the administration’s leading advocates of the so-called “pivot” or “rebalance” to Asia – a White House priority that looks to be perpetually subsumed by the Middle Eastern and now eastern European crises that the administration seeks to manage.

Work, who has been Hagel’s second in command since the spring, is considered one of his generation’s leading seapower strategists. One of few Obama appointments to enjoy the confidence of liberal and conservative defense wonks, Work has less of a profile on Middle Eastern issues, but extensive experience examining China and the Pacific.