Biden’s Pentagon Vanishing Act

If the Secretary of Defense in a Democratic administration goes missing for four days, does anyone notice? Apparently, the answer is a resounding “no.”

On Saturday, the country learned that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin vanished into the ICU at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for four days beginning January 1 following complications from a surgical procedure. During that time, despite Austin missing White House meetings, the Pentagon failed to inform anyone at the White House – including President Joe Biden and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan – that the country’s top civilian defense official was completely incapable of performing his duties.

The scandal would be laughable if the stakes were not so high.

China is currently escalating its pressure on Taiwan in the leadup to presidential elections on the island taking place on January 13. Wars rage on in Gaza and Ukraine, and Venezuela may be poised to invade neighboring Guyana.

Meanwhile, Iranian-backed Houthi militants in Yemen have all but shut-down the Red Sea to non-Chinese shipping, forcing container ships to travel around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope as in the days before the construction of the Suez Canal. A half-hearted attempt by the United States to form a naval coalition to counter the Houthi threat collapsed amidst acrimony and farce. While announcing they would send warships to the Red Sea, first France, then Italy, Spain, and Australia made clear they would not be operating under American command or as part of the U.S.-led Operation Prosperity Guardian.

There are multiple reasons Operation Prosperity Guardian fell apart, and it would be unfair to blame it entirely or even largely on Lloyd Austin. However, the mysterious disappearance of the man who announced the operation to great fanfare and few details cannot have reassured governments to accept American command. It likely reinforced a greater objection to the prospect of accepting direction from Washington.

Whether in Afghanistan, Ukraine, Gaza, or now the Red Sea, under Joe Biden the United States has failed to clarify for allies what goals it is seeking to achieve, or how many resources it intends to commit to the task. Many nations contributed forces to Afghanistan, and even more non-combat resources, only to be blindsided by a withdrawal that was announced, planned, and executed (and the use of those last two words is generous) with little to no consultation or advance warning.

In Ukraine, nations like France abandoned mediation efforts between Kyiv and Moscow only to now learn that the Biden administration has suddenly decided it is interested in pursuing such options to end the conflict. Worse, other countries do not even know who the decision-makers are.

Historically, American allies could rely on a relationship with U.S. military leadership for clarity that was often missing from political leaders, but increasingly they appear to have been sidelined and kept in the dark. Lloyd Austin may be Secretary of Defense, but in a Biden administration which seems to be defined by personal access—and personal access appears restricted to those who worked with Biden as a Senator or vice president—Austin’s outsider status seemingly rendered him an irrelevance. As much was evidenced by the fact that Austin failed to attend a high-level meeting last week and Sullivan shrugged it off, not bothering to ask where the Secretary of Defense was.

This failure indicts the Biden team as much as Austin’s, and implies that, other than formal meetings, the U.S. National Security Adviser finds it normal to be out of contact with the Secretary of Defense for days at a time during a period where multiple armed conflicts are ongoing and tensions are rising in the Taiwan Strait. If Sullivan did not expect to speak to Austin during this four-day period, how many other four-day periods have gone by where the same occurred?

The implication being missed amidst the war of leaks trying to scapegoat the Secretary of Defense is that the Pentagon has been entirely cut out of national security policymaking. The Pentagon is clearly not considered a relevant actor when it comes to Taiwan, or Gaza, or even evidently Ukraine.

Rather, the Biden Pentagon exists largely to answer questions, and it was only when comment was desired on a recent article highlighting supposed corruption within China’s Rocket Forces that someone bothered to call up the Pentagon.

In sidelining the Pentagon and military leadership, Biden is merely following in the footsteps of Barack Obama. Obama’s administration saw a revolving door of Secretaries of Defense, almost all of whom were at least initially significant national figures but found it impossible to perform the job.

Robert Gates had served under both Bush presidencies and headed the CIA, yet he left, frustrated with the lack of focus on budget priorities and expressing doubts about Obama’s commitment to the mission in Afghanistan. He saved some particularly sharp words for then-Vice President Biden, who he famously said has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

Gates’s successor, Leon Panetta, lasted little over a year. Panetta, formerly Obama’s CIA Director and Bill Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff, also resigned. He later admitted that he felt sidelined from the negotiation process with Iran and was frustrated at the fact that he felt Obama would not be willing to strike Iran to prevent it from becoming a nuclear power.

Panetta was followed by Chuck Hagel, a former Republican Senator who had been lionized by Democrats and the media as a foreign policy statesman due to his criticism of the Iraq War. Hagel had broken with his long-time friend John McCain in the 2008 election. He was rewarded by being, in his own words, “backstabbed” and forced to resign in 2015 after growing frustrated with his isolation from decision-making, especially regarding the response to ISIS.

After three Secretaries of Defense who were significant figures and attempted to assert at least some say on national security policy, Obama settled on Ash Carter, an academic who had never held elected office or headed any agency. A professional under-secretary, Carter acted like one, subordinating the Pentagon to the Obama White House.

The experiment worked well-enough that when Biden chose a Defense Secretary, he also picked a professional bureaucrat.

The problem is not that Lloyd Austin is incompetent or has no views. It is that he is the enforcer for the White House at the Pentagon, rather than the other way around. Last winter, when, in the aftermath of Ukraine’s successful Kharkiv offensive, Mark Milley suggested there would never be a more favorable moment for Ukraine to consider negotiations, Austin flew to Kyiv and expressed his personal confidence in Ukraine’s ability to retake Russian-occupied territory.

This was contradicting the judgement of his top professional commanders, but echoing the views of the National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, who, according to reports, had taken full control of the Biden administration’s response to the war.

In short, Austin’s job has never been to tell hard truths to Biden or his team. Rather, it is to tell anyone else at the Pentagon who tries to do so to shut up. That likely explains why Sullivan and others at the White House were able to conflate “no news” from Austin with being “good news.”

This is, of course, not the way to run an effective government, though to be fair that remark could be made about half a dozen different ways in which the Biden administration has elevated dysfunction into performance art. It is, as we learned in Afghanistan and are now learning in the Red Sea, a very good way to ensure military operations are ineffective at best, and fiascos at worst. The real danger is that this system remains in place when the real crisis comes to a head in the Pacific.

Fixing this problem almost certainly means a change of administration, and likely of party. Replacing Austin will do little to improve the situation and perhaps even make it worse, as Austin is guilty merely of being exactly as ineffective as Biden wants him to be.

Furthermore, as this dynamic predates Biden, going back to the Obama years, it is likely intrinsic to the current attitude of the Democratic Party toward the military and questions of national defense.

As long as the Biden-Obama team remain in office, it won’t matter who heads the Pentagon, or even if they vanish into thin air.

Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.