United States
President Donald Trump on Monday fired Defence Secretary Mark Esper, a move
that further destabilises a government trying to come to grips with his defiance of the electoral defeat to Democrat Joe Biden.

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

Christopher
Miller, the current head of the National Counterterrorism Center and a former
special forces officer, will replace Esper as the acting defence secretary, Trump
confirmed.

Esper was
Trump’s fourth defence secretary in four years and had served for only 16
months as he tried to keep himself out of the political narrative in his
attempt to reshape the Pentagon’s bureaucracy and prepare the American defence around
the globe for the rising threat from China, according to AFP.

He drew Trump’s
ire by resisting pressure to use federal troops to suppress civil unrest and
was not fully committed to Trump’s plans of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan
with the country still gripped by violence.

Although
the move was expected by many insiders, the timing of the firing comes as a bit
of a shock, days after losing his re-election bid to Joe Biden and around 10
weeks before his departure from the White House.

Esper’s successor
Miller has spent 31 years in the military, having been deployed to Afghanistan
and Iraq in 2001 and 2003 respectively with the special forces.

Following his
retirement, he became a consultant on clandestine operations and intelligence
to the federal government.

He served
as the White House advisor on counterterrorism and transnational threats in 2018-19
and was the deputy assistant secretary of defence for special operations. He
took over as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center in August.