Three days before Christmas, Army four-star General Lloyd Austin, the seventy-year-old secretary of defense, disappeared—he was simply no longer to be found in the Pentagon—and President Biden and his aides did not know about it for ten days. He had gone, without notice to the president he serves, into an Army hospital to be treated for an unspecified illness. The story broke in the media—it was front-page stuff—and Admiral John Kirby, spokesman for the National Security Council, told the press corps that the president has no plans to fire him: “We will obviously, I think, as you might expect, we’ll take a look at the process and procedures here and try to learn from this experience.” He did not indicate what there was to learn.
Kirby added that Biden continues to have full confidence in Austin and “looks forward to having him back at the Pentagon as soon as possible. . . . There is no—no plans or anything other than for Secretary Austin to stay in the job.”
Austin’s medical timeline, as put together by the Associated Press, began on December 22 when the secretary went through a surgical procedure for prostate cancer at the Army’s Walter Reed Hospital while under general anesthesia. He did not inform President Biden or anyone in the White House about the procedure, but he did temporarily transfer some of his authority to Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks. She was not told why he was doing so. Austin was discharged from the hospital the next day and worked from home until New Year’s Day when, in severe pain, he was rushed by ambulance to the hospital and admitted to the intensive care unit. He informed no one on his staff or in the White House about the crisis.
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On January 2, on the advice of his Army doctors, he summoned a junior aide to the hospital and again transferred some of his operational responsibilities to Hicks, who was then on vacation in Puerto Rico. She was not told of his renewed hospitalization.
That day Austin informed four members of his staff, who include two senior generals and his civilian chief of staff and civilian chief of public affairs, of his continuing hospitalization. None of them relayed that information to the White House. It is not known whether they were under orders from Austin not to do so. Air Force General Charles Brown, the newly appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was told of Austin’s continuing illness and he, too, kept his peace. The Pentagon press corps was told nothing.
On Thursday, January 4, US fighter bombers conducted a mission pre-approved by Austin and bombed a military target in Baghdad. Hicks was finally told that Austin was hospitalized, and she and an aide notified Congress and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, who told Biden. The press and public were informed the next day by the Pentagon that Austin was at Walter Reed. There was an uproar and Austin issued an apology on January 6 saying he “could have done a better job” in terms of telling the media and the public what was going on. The president still had not been told that his secretary of defense was treated at Walter Reed for prostate cancer two weeks earlier and returned to the ICU on New Year’s Day. Two days later Biden was informed that his secretary of defense was being treated for cancer.
All of this was going on at a time when there was a war, or two and possibly three, underway.
Austin’s behavior was especially mysterious because of his by-the-book success in the Army after his graduation from West Point in 1975. He went through airborne and Ranger training and was selected to attend all the right schools, including the Army War College, Auburn, and Webster University. He served in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, and held command positions in some of the Army’s most elite fighting units, including the 10th Mountain Division, the 82nd Airborne Division, and the 3rd Infantry Division, which he led into Baghdad. In 2009, he was named director of the staff serving the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon, a plum assignment that invariably led to four stars and more important posts. Sure enough, President Barack Obama later named him as the Army’s vice chief of staff. He was the commander of the vital CENTCOM from 2013 to 2016. He retired in 2016 and served on various corporate boards, including those of Raytheon, Nucor, and Tenet Healthcare, before being named secretary of defense by Biden. He won near unanimous Senate confirmation.
One experienced retired officer, who served for decades at high levels in the Pentagon and worked closely with members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told me that the office of the secretary of defense, famously directed by Robert S. McNamara in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and Donald Rumsfeld in the George W. Bush presidency, has become glamorous and more important. “The secretary’s schedule,” he said, “is so tight that he cannot take coffee by himself. He has an appointment calendar that is made up a week in advance.” On many mornings prior secretaries “would get a briefing from the Defense Intelligence Agency and afterward would go to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and get their brief.” The chairman of the Joint Chiefs has no operational role in the running of the military, but he is the senior adviser to the president on military affairs. The job of running America’s armed forces, and its wars, falls to Austin. “He is the implementer,” the officer told me.
Austin has eschewed the glamour and the often fawning attention of the Pentagon press corps. It just wasn’t for him. The best clue to the secretary’s behavior in the last weeks came amid an otherwise laudatory article in the New York Times on December 18 by two reporters who told how “President Biden’s quiet man at the Pentagon” made his second visit to Israel, “and into the limelight” of the increasingly controversial Israeli war against Hamas. The dispatch noted that Austin had “kept a low profile” while in office and that it’s been “more than a year” since he briefed the Pentagon press corps. Austin “sometimes avoids reporters who travel with him overseas. On those trips, he prefers to dine alone in his hotel room when he does not have an engagement with a foreign counterpart.” A successful four-star general in charge of an enormous war machine who is a dedicated loner? More than a little interesting.
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The retired Pentagon officer, who maintains close ties to the Pentagon, told me that the issue with Austin “is not that he went AWOL, but that nobody asked and nobody missed him in the Pentagon or the White House. Nobody asked where he was. No alarm bells go off that the secretary is missing. No one cares where he goes. How can you disappear for a week if you’re doing something? The secretary of defense is the most important member of the Cabinet—the one who the president, and the nation, depend upon for national security. You don’t depend on the secretary of state for that,” the retired officer said.
The United States currently is party to two hot wars—by supplying arms, funding, and advice to Ukraine and to Israel. It is in what seems to be a long-term cold war with Russia and China: these rivalries have been a mainstay of the Biden administration’s foreign policy. They are losing policies, in my view, that Biden and the Democrats will pay dearly for in the coming election. Yet another important election is scheduled to take place on Saturday in Taiwan; its result will have significant implications for US policy toward China. The US is also involved in what could become a hot war in the Red Sea. American Navy ships and commercial cargo ships have been attacked since October by missiles and PT boats manned by Houthis from Yemen, who are supported by Iran and have declared that they will continue attacking international commercial sea traffic in support of Hamas and the besieged civilians of Gaza.
