Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was hospitalized at Walter Reed Medical Center on January 1 for complications related to an as-yet-unspecified “minor elective surgery” he received on December 22. Austin had been at home recovering from the surgery since December 23, but, when he was admitted to Walter Reed with acute pain, he was sent straight to the intensive care unit, where he remained for the next four days.
All of this would be fairly unremarkable — complications from surgery, however unfortunate, are a regular occurrence — were it not for the fact that by all accounts Secretary Austin went AWOL with the White House during this period. Although a few top officials in the Pentagon were apparently aware that Austin had been rushed to the ICU on Monday, they failed to notify either President Biden or Jake Sullivan and the National Security Council until several days later that the secretary of defense was in the ICU. (Austin reportedly avoided detection of his hospitalization by claiming to be “working from home” during the entire week, quite the luxury for a secretary of defense during such fraught times.)
Austin was hospitalized on a Monday. General C. Q. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was not informed that Austin had been hospitalized until Tuesday. Neither the White House nor Austin’s understudy, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, was informed of his whereabouts or the threat to his health until Thursday — a matter of particular concern given that Hicks herself was vacationing in Puerto Rico at the time. Austin remains in the hospital as of this writing, although he has been removed from intensive care and is said to be on the mend.
Nothing about this is remotely normal. The secretary of defense does not typically disappear “off the grid” and remain unaccounted for to his superiors for several days, like Mark Sanford hiking the Appalachian Trail. In any sane world, the details of this story as reported by Politico, NBC News, and others would require Lloyd Austin’s immediate resignation. The American public’s ignorance as to the secretary’s whereabouts is immaterial; the public doesn’t need to be told when our military and civilian leaders have scheduled their colonoscopies. The fact, rather, that Austin, said to be an intensely private person, failed to notify members of his chain of command, as well as key stakeholders in the government — there can be few more important than the commander in chief or the NSC — is a transparently fireable offense.
And yet Joe Biden’s administration has been at great pains to signal that Secretary Austin is welcome back to the fold. Politico reported today that President Biden “would not accept a resignation if Austin were to offer one,” which is as clear a signal as the administration is capable of sending to the media to back away from covering this. If the White House didn’t fire anyone over the Afghanistan pullout, why start insisting on competence now?
Perhaps the most fitting commentary on the administration’s passivity in the Middle East, and particularly the Red Sea, is that its secretary of defense went missing and no one noticed.