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This domestic violence thing is just a floated excuse anyway. The real reason for Shanahan being withdrawn from contention are the legal problems that he caused himself in the post of acting-SECDEF. What legal problems would that be?

1) Telling people all over the place that "Lockheed can't run a program", Lockheed "is all F***-ed up", and similar rants. Shanahan was high up in Boeing management and couldn't keep his pie-hole in check about how biased he was against Lockheed. By repeatedly bad-mouthing Lockheed in front of acquisition officials that became alarmed enough to lodge formal complaints, he was committing undue command influence. Not a good move for the #1 acquisition official at the Pentagon. Whether he knew it or not, he was putting out word that he was a Boeing guy and anybody in DoD acquisition that cares about their career had better be a Boeing guy, too. This is a huge legal problem. Any time that Lockheed loses a bid for contract, they're rock-solid to protest on the grounds that the SECDEF has biased the DoD acquisition process through his very own words. For this reason alone, he had to go.

2) As soon as Shanahan came in, suddenly the Air Force is buying F-15X jet fighters completely out-of-cycle, was never in the 2020 budget proposal, the decision was made with zero oversight, and without congressional approval. This is gross misappropriation of funds, not a good move for a guy that has only been in the job for 5 minutes. As Mattis was stepping out the door, he lamely said, "Uh, the F-15 buy was my idea, not Shanahan's." An IG report, responding to formal complaints inside DoD, anemically found "no wrongdoing". Yeah, whatever. Mattis is going into the business world and doesn't want to make waves on his way to making a few hundred million bucks that his kids will enjoy, of course he's going to take one for the team on his way out. But there's no denying: nobody was talking seriously about an F-15 buy until Shanahan came onboard. If it's not his doing it is the granddaddy of amazing coincidences and comes off like a big fat lie no matter how you slice it. And now that Shanahan has stepped off, the F-15X proposal is quickly dying. That right there should tell you something.