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Ongoing controversies as Secretary of Defense Austin and DoD clique concealed the SecDef's cancer diagnosis from White House. Austin received treatment for cancer in late December just before Xmas, and then was hospitalized January 1st for complications from the treatment.
Further coverage here
Biden reportedly has no intention of firing Austin, with officials stating that they will "learn from the experience."
While I think the WWIII crowd in the peanut gallery are mostly exaggerating the state of the world today, I can't deny the existence of numerous crises in which the US military might need to act or react at a moment's notice. And while I have an incredible disdain for the efforts of the DoD over the past two decades, the SecDef's whole job is to be on hand for those situations, to coordinate responses to threats to the United States and its allies.
There is very little clarity on what the SecDef's capabilities were at any given time. He was under general anesthetic during his treatment in December for some period of time, and needed to be hospitalized on the 1st. DoD spokespeople claim that he has access to everything he needs to do his job, in the way of secure communications equipment. But there is no argument that 1) People going through cancer treatment are not at 100% ability, 2) 70 year old men who need to be hospitalized are not at 100% of their ability, 3) we presumably put all that money into building the Pentagon for the purpose of creating the ideal situation for him to respond to any crisis and to do his job, 4) a hospital bed will be less optimal. There is no argument that when Austin is undergoing cancer treatment in the hospital, he will be performing his duties as SecDef at a suboptimal level.
Given the possibility of a Russian push or a Ukrainian collapse, of an outbreak of Genocide in southern Israel, or of a Houthi strike on who-knows-what, to say nothing of a wild-card in Korea or Taiwan or Guyana...are we really ok with the SecDef operating at 50% and not telling the president? How clear were chains of command and authority in case of a crisis at time that Austin was incapacitated? Would Biden have been looking for Austin when he got the famous 2am phone call and been unable to find him? Who would have given orders in such a case?
This is terrible optics for the administration, and constitutes the strongest public evidence for the theory that "Joe Biden is President Grandpa, given a warm glass of milk and sent to bed before the real meetings between the bureaucrats happens." While other presidents have had conflicts with the DoD (Obama famously feuded with "The Generals" about pulling out of Afghanistan, while it appears that Trump was directly lied to about the presence of US troops in Syria to prevent them from being pulled out), this is a serious escalation. Civilian control of the military has been undermined by the appointment of former career generals to head the DoD, it is destroyed if the former generals don't even report to the president, if POTUS doesn't know who is actually giving the orders over there.
How involved can the President be in DoD decision making around NatSec if he didn't even know the SecDef was out of commission? How much interagency rivalry exists that DoD subordinates would agree to hide what was going on from the President? How low-trust is the relationship between SecDef and POTUS that he wouldn't simply disclose the diagnosis and appoint an acting interim chief, clearly Austin felt that if he stepped away for a second he would be ousted? How weak is this president if he is scared to punish Austin for his clear dereliction of duty and deceit? How much is the president kept out of things if no one else (say, the CIA or FBI?) informed him of what was going on for FOUR DAYS?
I'm left with more questions than answers.
A prostatectomy within a month of diagnosis at his age suggests accelerated cancer.
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I do not believe that the Biden white house has more than a ceremonial purpose. Its reality TV for political junkies.
The machinery of USGov will operate itself whether the big guys call in sick or not. It would be a horrible weakness for any of them to actually be important anyway.
Biden is not FDR and Austin is not Truman. Those sort of men are not living today.
Perhaps for the best, the dreams of those those men killed millions. But I do wonder how an autonomous bureaucracy will operate during world war 3. Probably it will execute a series of pointless and poorly planned small interventions in seemingly random theatres. Well, that's basically where we are now.
Fawning articles about our military (sometimes under the guise of promoting Ukraine's internalized lessons from us) often celebrate autonomy throughout the chain of command. For whatever peanuts it's worth, running a business the same way provides dividends too. In a western culture, it "just makes sense".
The concept of civilian control, however, is important. The average American has no concept of why crossing the Rubicon is important, and closes their eyes to the churn of cycles of violent coups that plague Africa.
Yes, there is weakness in enforcing the chain of command. But I don't think the military-industrial complex in this country needs a longer leash.
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This assertion flies in the face of a great deal of reporting about White House deliberations and decisions. The President still has a very high degree of control over the military in terms of which operations are done. It's just that the military is very persuasive about arguing for the status quo. That's not "ceremonial purpose", it's a process that re-occurs with practically every president. A sufficiently determined president can and will make changes. Before you cry "oh but Trump was stymied by the deep state!" the much more likely conclusion is merely that he cared more about the appearance of being a loose cannon than actually doing so.
Also, another huge hold with this assertion: you forget that the president is literally the only one to nominate leaders in the Cabinet, and a whole host of others to boot. It's like claiming that a corporate board that is in charge of hiring the CEO has no control of the company... Like sure, there's a big degree of separation but they certainly DO have a lot of control in a broad sense!
We know for a fact that the Pentagon lied to him about the number of troops stationed in Syria (I think), which also colors your point about them being persuasive, somewhat.
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Maybe the highest level of government are just different, but it would be strange in my industry if you had no contact with your direct report for such a long time.
And if you’re going to be incapacitated during expected work days you’re definitely expected to tell your manager.
I guess they’re not big on instant messaging?
It seems like with multiple major crises going on around the world the secretary of defense would be in touch with the president like, every day. Maybe more often than that.
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I can't imagine running a coffee shop without someone being in a position to make decisions, with a clear outline of which decisions can and can't be made.
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YMMV, but I generally tell my reports to me find me when they have a problem they can't fix or they need me to do something. Same with my boss.
We're a "no news means you're doing everything we discussed and no issues have arisen" kind of a shop.
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FWIW, my boss is pretty absentee and I only hear from him about once every 2 to 4 months. I work remote writing boring tax software.
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Consider also that the Deputy Defence Secretary Kathleen Hicks was on holiday in Puerto Rico at the time.
I don't think this in itself takes anything away from US capabilities, it takes time for crises to develop. And even if they disappeared off the face of the earth, Washington is a big swamp, they could find more of these people pretty easily. What it does show is that US leadership is confused and inept - which is fairly obvious given their track record in recent years. Forget four days of absence, they covered up defeat in Afghanistan for a decade if not longer, squandered trillions on counterproductive wars. As much as I dislike Hanania his thread on the Afghanistan Papers makes for remarkable reading, it's absolutely damning what these people were getting away with. Procurement is a shambles and they can't fill their ranks.
Why would anyone expect the upper management of such a troubled organization to be capable or efficient?
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Yeah, the Secretary of Defense is definitely one of those "learn on the job" positions, where competence is not to be expected, at least not immediately.
And he's only been in the job for about three years. Completely unreasonable to expect him to understand his responsibilities yet.
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This really makes me wonder how much importance cabinet secretaries actually have in the United States. In contrast to Westminster governments where the cabinet itself, and cabinet-level officials, have a great deal of importance, the cabinet of the US is really just a body of advisors to the President who has unilateral authority over the executive branch. We don't have anything like a finance minister who is in charge of the budget, or a home secretary who is in charge of domestic policy. We have the President, who is the man, and then we have a bunch of technocrats with domain-specific knowledge, as well as Pete Buttigieg, who only show up in the news when something goes wrong, or in the occasional moment where technocratic information about, like, interest rates is relevant. I think of cabinet secretaries as civil servants who happen to be politically appointed.
Maybe it's not such a big deal that the defense secretary disappeared, because the President liases with the joint chiefs himself anyway. It's not like the defense secretary is the commander in chief.
Vice President might be the most insignificant office, but "Secretary of X" follows closely behind.
By the same token though, whereas a Minister of Defence will typically be a factional leader with real political power of his own and therefore somewhat dangerous for a Prime Minister to punish, a SecDef serves entirely at the pleasure of the President. If Biden were to say "this is unacceptable, get the hell out of my cabinet", Austin could not retaliate by instigating a leadership challenge or something. So while America's political structure might make the offence less serious, it also makes the failure to hold Austin accountable more inexcusable.
Cuts both ways -- it also means you can't use some ministerial matter as a pretense to punish a rival for political reasons.
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It makes me wonder: if every Cabinet official disappeared overnight, how long would it take for it to become common knowledge among top level officials in the departments they manage? How long until it hit the news media?
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It all seems bizarre to me. Before this incident, I had an idea that if a member of the cabinet or other high-ranking government official was unaccounted for, even for a couple hours, Secret Service would be notifying the President, intelligence agencies would be tasked with tracking them down, and we'd know by the end of the day if they were kidnapped by an adversary, fell into a sink hole, whatever.
I'm not clear yet how this scenario updates my priors. Could the Defense Secretary have been kidnapped by Russia without anyone knowing? His top staffers didn't know he was hospitalized until the next day, how did they find out and why didn't they find out sooner?
That's the bit that boggles my mind. If anything, I feel like this incident reflects far more poorly on Biden and the White House than it does on Austin. Like how do you lose a senior cabinet official for 4 days and not know. Like are they not having a regular semi-weekley meeting/conference call where the assorted department heads discuss what's going on in the world. Did no one in the White House try to call the SecDef's office to get an update on what's going on in the Red-Sea, Gaza, Ukraine, or the latest procurement kerfuffle and upon being told that both the SecDef and Deputy SecDef were unavailable start asking the obvious follow-on questions?
In all honesty, it was probably because of the Middle East conflagration going on over the new years that Austin's absence slipped through the cracks.
Austin's surgeries, both the deliberate and the follow-up, coincided with the federal government's end-of-year functional shutdown where employees are expected/encouraged/enabled to maximially disperse to spend the holidays with family. While the upper echelons of the US federal government do maintain a degree of 24/7 operations, it's very much a skeleton crew / 'as needed' sort of deal, and senior executives can more or less accept varying degrees of staffing degradation to let people go for the holidays. The significance of the New Years date of his follow-on surgery isn't just that it's a general holiday, but that the first week in January is always low/partial manning as well, and generally a 'nothing is expected to get done' week as various holiday leave/vacation types are expected to filter back in across the week. People who took New Years instead of Christmas absences, inevitable flight delays/cancellations, etc. The 4 days it took to be widely reported just-so-happened to be the days where general absences are most expected, and thus not the sort of obviously-unusual absence in abstract- especially since Austin's 22DEC absence for medical reasons already primed the defense establishment to operate without him in the direct loop.
The reason why the Red Sea issue likely contributed to obscuring recognition is that the Secretary of Defense is a policy-role, not an operational role, and the Red Sea issue is, well, an operational issue- and one that was already being managed/run at the sub-secretary level before Austin's return to the hospital. The White House has direct military lines of communication for this sort of thing- especially via the Joint Chiefs or the Combatant Commander directly- and so if/as they need theater-specific updates rather than policy updates, they not only could get updates directly from the theater, but likely already were... not least because that was probably how Austin had things set up before his initial surgery, on 22DEC, i.e. right before the Christmas downtime.
If I had to wager what happened, the contingency reporting channels not requiring Secretary of Defense involvement were almost certainly established before the Christmas period so that Secretary Austin wasn't needed to be in the loop, and were part of the skeleton crew's 'normal duty' for the entire Christmas-leave period. Since the procedures were already established, they were simply maintained, and the people doing the maintaining weren't the ones who would normally be reporting SecDef changes in status. Since the situation assessments/daily flows/briefings were still flowing from the DoD via the same non-Austin channels that they would have been during the Christmas period when he was also absent, his continued absence wouldn't have been obvious on either end.
None of this should detract from whether it should have been tracked better, but Austin obviously already released a lot of his staff who normally would have been present/sharing the news over the holidays, and the DoD reporting infrastructure was almost certainly already set up to not require him over the calendar period where he wasn't present.
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Exactly. Anyone at any moment could end up unconscious in an ER or worse. I really hope that the security of our nation does not rely on a dead person calling in sick. Either it does, or the Commander in Chief and the Secretary of Defense have no impact on the day to day security of our nation. Which is worse?
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I heard the story that the tumor(s) Austin had removed were benign. That doesn't make sense to me, but would reconcile his diagnosis with the earlier reports that his surgery was elective.
Abdicating authority like that without even warning the administration should be a fireable or even impeachable offense, but I'm not surprised this administration decided to stick its head in the sand and pretend there's not anything even remotely scandalous. I can only imagine this as a great personal foible in Austin himself. Maybe the administration has already obtained his resignation and will sit on it for a few months until it can be plausibly be unconnected with this story.
It isn't clear to me whether he had a partial or complete prostatectomy, but generally at his age the treatment would be "watch and wait." Prostate cancer isn't terribly uncommon in black men his age (actually the highest risk group) but it isn't always aggressive. To go full surgery less than a month after diagnosis, for benign tumors no less, strains credulity. Maybe because he isn't the average joe they are being hypercautious?
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What’s with this admin and cabinet level officials taking unannounced vacations with no acting official? Buttigieg did it earlier too.
I don’t believe Buttigieg’s paternity leave was kept from the White House, it just wasn’t announced to the public.
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