Joe Biden has chosen retired Army General Lloyd Austin for Secretary of Defense. Some on the Left are not happy with the General. So, that’s a plus.
A sitting board member of military industrial contractor Raytheon should NOT be heading the Pentagon. Terrible choice. I hope progessives in Congress will speak up loudly. https://t.co/9P3l7iMDc7 [1]
— Marianne Williamson (@marwilliamson) December 8, 2020 [2]
Aside from being a serious corporate type, General Austin is also black and being hailed as the first black person nominated to the post. If General Austin is any kind of soldier, and I bet he is, he knows his race is meaningless. Or certainly should be. In the Army everyone bleeds green and you get no special perks or get treated worse because of the color of your skin or your ethnicity.
My Army service was the only time in my life I encountered a truly post-racial society. Nobody cared. In fact, smart ass lower enlisted intel types like me were equally weak and worthless to most NCOs I ran across. This equality of shared misery coupled with cocky unit cohesion turned guys from all over and different backgrounds into color blind fighting units. The press covering this story, as few if any have served in uniform, will not get that. If Austin uses his color for points it would be a disgusting display of race hustling that most in the military will find repugnant.
Defense analyst James Carafano has a take on the Austin nomination to the Pentagon. “The team at the Pentagon during President Barack Obama’s administration hummed along relatively seamlessly for eight years presiding over a historic decline in military readiness and defense capabilities, while Russia and China closed the gap. Why? That was the policy President Obama wanted. We know very little about what kind of defense policy a Biden presidency will deliver. The issue hardly came up on the presidential campaign trail. That might be because there was little to criticize in the Trump defense policy. But this does leave a giant question mark over what to expect from Biden presidency. The nomination of Austin doesn’t give us much of an answer.
“All we know for sure is that there are many discordant voices on the left. Some want to gut our nuclear arms. Some are among the most isolationist and would be happy to withdraw from the world and let the United Nations run everything. Many Democrats would like to reverse Trump’s policies in the Middle East and Northeast Asia that have made those regions the most stable in decades. Many don’t want to show a strong face against China or ensure that America’s conventional and strategic deterrence is unassailable. We don’t know how influential these voices on the left will be in a Biden White House. We don’t know where Biden will stand on these issues.” And that’s why General Austin’s nomination will and should get a thorough review by the Senate. If found competent for the job, it will be nice to have someone on the Biden national security team who might know what they’re doing.