Some liberals are still brooding that President-elect Joe Biden tapped a military man in retired Gen. Lloyd Austin as his nominee for secretary of the Department of Defense. Chief among their concerns is that, if confirmed, Austin will go down the same failed path as a predecessor and surround himself with former and active members of the military.
“Nominating a recently retired general officer is a threat to our democracy,” Alexander McCoy, political director of the progressive veterans’ group Common Defense, told the Washington Examiner. “It is a dangerous politicization of the military.”
The 180,000-member group communicated its “red line” to the Biden transition team that it would oppose a retired general.
“If your only experience is serving 41 years in the military and serving on the board of a major defense corporation, then most of your network is going to consist of fellow military officers or executives and board members of large defense corporations,” said McCoy, noting Austin’s ties to Raytheon, a defense contractor.
“It would be certainly troubling and bad for our national security and contrary to the needs and interests of the American people if the next secretary of defense followed the pattern set by James Mattis,” he added.
A source familiar with Austin’s preliminary personnel search told the Washington Examiner that early indications are that Austin is following precisely the same path as Mattis.
“I absolutely would expect that Austin is going to default to people he knows and trust well,” the source said. “Most of those people are going to be retired Army officers.”
The source asked not to be named because so few people have been privy to Austin’s early discussions.
One of the fatal flaws of President Trump’s first defense secretary pick, Mattis, a retired general, was building a DOD team of former and active-duty military officials — people practiced in warfighting, not the politics and strategy of guiding the vast Pentagon bureaucracy.
“There will be a huge amount of concern about yet more senior Army officers holding jobs held by civilians,” the source said. “There will be a lot of opposition to that within the civilian defense community.”
The Trump administration consisted of multiple former military men in traditionally civilian roles. They included Mattis, who received a congressional waiver to serve as secretary, retired Gen. Michael Flynn, who briefly served in the role of national security adviser, retired Gen. H.R. McMaster, who also took that post, and retired Gen. John Kelly as White House chief of staff.
In introducing Austin last week, Biden stressed his respect for civilian control of the military. He also said that civilians would advise his nominee, should Austin be granted a congressional waiver and be approved by the Senate.
“I believe in the importance of civilian control of the military. So does the secretary-designate Austin,” Biden said in Wilmington, Delaware, on Wednesday.
“He’ll be bolstered by a strong and empowered civilian sector and senior officers — senior officials, l should say, working to shape DOD’s policies and ensure that our defense policies are accountable to the American people,” the president-elect added. “Civilian-military, that dynamic itself has been under great stress the past four years.”
The Heritage Foundation’s retired Lt. Gen. Tom Spoehr told the Washington Examiner that the former U.S. Central Command and Iraq campaign commander is too smart to further ruffle the feathers of liberals or repeat Mattis’s mistakes.
“He’s very smart, and he understands perception,” said Spoehr, who acknowledged that Mattis’s decision to fill key slots, including his chief of staff, with former military officers was widely criticized.
“Even if that’s what he wanted and that’s the people that he knows, he’s going to be cautious and careful,” said Spoehr, who worked for Austin in Iraq. “You’re not going to walk in there and it’s going to look like CENTCOM.”
