Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Foreign Affairs

We begin today with Max Boot of The Washington Post urging “the Beltway cognoscenti” to stop the pile-on of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin because of his secrecy about his health.

Amid all this “Sturm und Drang,” it’s easy to lose sight of the key issue: Was there a breakdown in national command authorities? The defense secretary is in the chain of command for the use of military force. It runs from the president to the secretary to the commanders in the field (except in the case of nuclear weapons where the chain of command runs from the president straight to the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon). So was there a period of time while Austin was in the hospital, where, if an emergency had occurred necessitating the use of force, there was no one available to give the command?

The Pentagon press secretary, Maj. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, assured me on Wednesday that this was not the case: “At no time was there a gap in chain of command of Department of Defense command and control,” he said. “There was never any risk to national security.” According to Ryder, both times when Austin went into the hospital — first on Dec. 22 for his prostate cancer surgery and then again on Jan. 1 to deal with complications resulting from that surgery — “operational authorities” were duly transferred to the deputy defense secretary, Kathleen Hicks. If the United States or its forces had been attacked at that time, she could have given the order to respond, even from her Puerto Rico vacation. (Austin is still in the hospital, but on Jan. 5, he resumed operational command.) [...]

Austin has restored a sense of calmness to the armed forces with his understated command presence. He has made clear that the military will uphold the Constitution, and he has sought to root out extremists in the military’s ranks, thereby earning himself the ire of the “Jan. 6 Party.” He hasn’t gotten everything right, but the biggest screw up on his watch — the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 — was not his fault. He warned President Biden against the pullout. But when Biden gave the order anyway, Austin executed it without leaking his disagreement to news organizations.