WASHINGTON — President-elect Joe Biden on Tuesday defended his decision to nominate retired four-star Army Gen. Lloyd Austin to be his secretary of Defense, a personnel choice that could become one of the incoming president’s most controversial.
Under the National Security Act of 1947, Congress has prohibited any individual from serving as secretary of defense within seven years of active-duty service. But Austin left the Army just four years ago, and he would require a special congressional waiver in order to bypass the seven-year rule.
Writing in The Atlantic, Biden tacitly acknowledged that Austin’s nomination violates the civilian requirement, but he argued that the strength of Austin’s qualifications outweighs the potential harm of blurring the civilian-military divide.
„I respect and believe in the importance of civilian control of our military and in the importance of a strong civil-military working relationship at DoD—as does Austin,“ wrote Biden.
„Austin also knows that the secretary of defense has a different set of responsibilities than a general officer and that the civil-military dynamic has been under great stress these past four years,“ Biden wrote.
If confirmed by the Senate, the 1975 graduate of West Point would be the first Black leader of the Pentagon, breaking one of the more enduring glass ceilings in the U.S. government.
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