Trump fires Defence Secretary Mark Esper after election defeat

Washington: President Donald Trump on Monday announced by tweet that he had fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper, further destabilizing a government already navigating Trump’s refusal to concede election defeat to Democrat Joe Biden.

“Mark Esper has been terminated. I would like to thank him for his service,” Trump said on Twitter.

He announced that Christopher Miller, the current head of the National Counterterrorism Center and former special forces officer, would replace Esper as acting defense secretary.

Esper, Trump’s fourth Pentagon chief in four years, was fired after 16 months in the job trying to keep his head down politically as he pursued fundamental reforms to the massive Pentagon bureaucracy and sought to reshape the US defense posture worldwide to focus on the threat of China.

But Trump was angered when Esper resisted pressure to deploy federal troops to quash civil unrest, and also slow-walked Trump’s desire for a rapid full withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan while violence continues in the country.