Not accurate, unfortunately. He had elective surgery on December 22, went home the next day, and then returned to the hospital with “complications” on January 1.
I’m sympathetic to the effect of complications; I nearly died from them after my triple bypass. However, if I were SecDef my wife would have notified others promptly upon my readmission to the hospital. And I wasn’t at Walter Reed, where I believe there is a special wing for such VIPs. That ward’s administrators surely must do notifications of high-profile entries routinely.
Doesn’t it seem strange that the Secretary of Defense could vanish for a few days like that? I mean, my wife is middle management, and if she gets sick she spends a bunch of time cancelling meetings, talking to people who can cover for her, setting her status in various social media work uses… I imagine that the Secretary of Defense has a pretty full calendar.
I would think that if SecDef didn’t show up for work at 8, by 9 there would be emails flying around. Certainly by the end of the day. And if day 2 came around and SecDef was still awol, you would expect peoole to be calling family, checking hospitals, etc. After all, he could be kidnapped or dead.
I think there might be another story here - I think it’s possible that the DoD doesn’t trust the White House to not be compromised or just full of leakers, and that DoD itself elected not to inform them. But that’s just a guess. On its face, the story given doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Former and current U.S. officials who have worked with Austin say he is well-known as an introvert, shunning the cameras and keeping only a few close confidantes during his decades-long military career. As the four-star general overseeing U.S. Central Command during the Iraq drawdown, he rarely held press conferences. As defense secretary, in contrast to his predecessors, he takes only a handful of media on official travel. He has not done a press conference in the Pentagon since last July, although he regularly briefs the press during his travels.
He is the opposite of what you’re describing. He keeps to himself. So if someone like that vanished you might not notice.
If you’re going to say that seems weird… Well yeah, that seems weird.
How can someone so introverted that no one knows where he is possibly be Secretary of Defense? How could he have climbed the ranks that high in the first place?
My wife is an introvert, but she doesn’t have a choice. Managers gotta manage.
I’m sure Biden doesn’t want to fire Austin if he can avoid it. No President wants to have to replace a Cabinet Secretary in an election year. It makes the Administration look incompetent, and the ensuing confirmation hearings for his replacement would give Republicans a high-profile podium from which to attack the Administration’s defense policy.
But the drumbeats aren’t receding, they’re getting louder. Republicans are to be expected to get the vapors over this, but even some senior Democrats in Congress are expressing concerns in a way that puts more heat on Austin.
I’m not (and never have been) Secretary of Defense , but I am a severe introvert who’s had a lifetime military career and succeeded well enough to rise into low-level leadership roles.
You learn. You “fake it”. You put on the mask of “not introverted” long enough and well enough to do your job, no matter how unnatural all that interaction and initiative and aggression and competition is.
And then at the end of the day, you take it off and rest, because that shit is exhausting.
So if Lloyd Austin is a fantastically successful introvert, I could completely understand the stress and exhaustion of a medical event interfering with the ability to come out of the shell at that moment.
But FWIW, as introverted as I am, I still haven’t ever gone dark without at least giving my colleagues and leadership the appropriate heads-up.
Lots of people end up in the ICU as a precaution, despite not actually being all that sick, and I would imagine that’s about 100000x more true if you’re the SecDef and you’re at Walter Reed.
He could have been perfectly able to work. If I were guessing, he’s probably the type of stubborn old cuss who damn sure won’t let anyone else tell him he’s too sick to work. (I’ve known a few.)
I’d also guess that he can do most of his job from anywhere, between cell phones and WiFi and whatever secret shit the military has.
So it’s possible (and I think likely) that he didn’t tell anybody because he never actually considered himself incapacitated enough to not be working. I have patients in the hospital doing full days of work from the bed all the time.
It’s still weird, but I don’t know that it has to be any more complicated than a stubborn old military coot too proud to take a day off.
Over the decades there must be many examples of Cabinet-level officials being hospitalized. Even of Secretaries of Defense being hospitalized.
I’d feel more confident of judging this “an outrage requiring resignation” or “not a.o.r.r.” if we had better statistics on the past history of this kind of thing. So far I’ve heard a few pundits dance around the topic, but no one is offering hard data.
Just how endangered was US security by the fact that Austin was in the hospital? Was he in an induced coma for part of that time, or was he reachable the entire time? That seems important, too.
Latest reporting says that Austin lied and told his staff that he was ‘working from home’. Therefore, there was an assumption that the chain of command was intact. The person who would have covered for him was on vacation anyway.
This is pretty bad. If there had been an international military crisis or god forbid a nuclear attack, the chain of c ommand appears to have been broken with no one knowing it for days. When minutes count, figuring out what happened to SecDef would have taken hours.
That’s bullshit - there is zero evidence that he was unreachable or “not working” - he (at this point) simply worked remotely and didn’t advise folks that his remotely was from a hospital room. Given that no one ‘knew’ he was in the hospital seems to speak greatly to his availability and ability to do his work. I assume that during these past few days that it was business as usual as far as his scheduled calls, etc.
, but I am a severe introvert who’s had a lifetime military career and succeeded well enough to rise into low-level leadership roles.