Opinion So far, there's no defense for Lloyd Austin's hospital silence

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Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who remains hospitalized after concealing
his condition from President Biden and White House officials for at least
three days, owes the public more answers about his health. That includes
the nature of the elective procedure he received on Dec. 22 and the
complications that led to him being taken by ambulance to Walter Reed
National Military Medical Center’s intensive care unit on New Year’s Day.
The public timeline that the Pentagon has so far released is unsettlingly
vague: The secretary was experiencing “severe pain,” it says, but someone
doesn’t typically take an ambulance to an ICU for a minor issue, even if
they’re a VIP.

We wish Mr. Austin a full and swift recovery regardless of his precise
condition. We would also appreciate more information. So far, there has
been no plausible explanation for the lack of transparency with which all
of the above proceeded in real time. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff found out about Mr. Austin’s hospitalization on Jan. 2, but the
White House — the ultimate civilian authority under the Constitution — was
kept in the dark for an additional 48 hours, until the afternoon of Jan.
4. (That same day, the U.S. military conducted an airstrike against
Islamist militants in Baghdad.) National security adviser Jake Sullivan
alerted the president, but the Pentagon waited to announce the
hospitalization until after 5 p.m. on Jan. 5 — a Friday-night news dump —
in a statement that claimed the secretary had resumed his duties. Mr.
Biden did not speak with his defense chief until the evening of Jan. 6.

Perhaps the most incomprehensible fact is that Deputy Defense Secretary
Kathleen Hicks did not find out her boss was hospitalized until Jan. 4,
even though the Pentagon says Mr. Austin granted Ms. Hicks temporary
duties on Jan. 2. She was not told why and remained in the Caribbean,
where she was vacationing, until Jan. 6.

When a Pentagon spokesman first disclosed Mr. Austin’s hospitalization, he
attributed the delayed notification to patient privacy. Uh, no. Senior
Cabinet officials do not have the same expectation of privacy as a private
citizen or even a military officer — and especially with regard to what
they tell the president. Recent precedents support that: The Pentagon
announced immediately that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had
undergone rotator cuff surgery in 2006 and that his successor, Robert M.
Gates, broke his arm after a fall in 2008.


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The fact that no one in the White House appears to have noticed the
secretary’s absence for several days amid heated conflicts in the Middle
East and in Ukraine is another riddle — and unfortunately implies Mr.
Austin, though an able man, is not as central to national security
decision-making as his counterparts, especially Secretary of State Antony
Blinken and Mr. Sullivan. Also unfortunately, Mr. Austin’s penchant for
secrecy regarding his health is consistent with his attitude toward public
engagement more broadly, particularly his reluctance to interact more than
minimally with the Pentagon press corps.

A full accounting of what happened and why is the first step toward
resolving this episode. Step 2 ought to be a full debate about the wisdom
of having recently retired generals serve as defense secretary. To ensure
civilian control of the military, and to prevent military habits of mind
from unduly shaping civilian policymaking, federal law requires that a
defense secretary cannot have served as a general for the preceding 10
years. For the first time since 1950, Congress voted to waive that rule so
that Jim Mattis could become President Donald Trump’s defense chief in
2017. It did so again for Mr. Biden’s nominee, Mr. Austin, in 2021.

Mr. Trump soured on Mr. Mattis, in part, because he resisted the
president’s wishes for how to use the military — just as many of those
senators who backed him for the job had counted on him to do. Mr. Biden
picked Mr. Austin for very different reasons: partly because he felt that
Mr. Austin, with whom he had a preexisting connection through his late
son, Beau, could do a good job and partly because he thought that, under
him, the Defense Department would not be the independent power center it
had sometimes been during the Obama administration.

To senators skeptical of granting a waiver so he could become secretary,
Mr. Austin swore he’d accept “meaningful oversight” from Congress and
pledged: “We will be transparent with you.” Those promises are why his
statement Saturday — admitting he “could have done a better job”
communicating about his illness and committing “to doing better” — will
not, and cannot, be the last words on this subject.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/08/lloyd-austin-defense-
secretary-civilian-control/