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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.
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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