No defense for Austin’s hospital silence

A full accounting of what happened and why is the first step toward resolving this episode.

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 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 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. 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 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 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.

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 Austin, though an able man, is not as central to national security decision-making as his counterparts, especially Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Sullivan. Also unfortunately, 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 Biden’s nominee, Austin, in 2021.

Trump soured on 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. Biden picked Austin for very different reasons: partly because he felt that 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, 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.