Austin carries close ties to Fort Bragg with him as he rises to Pentagon’s top post
When President-elect Joe Biden first announced retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin as his pick for Defense secretary, the phone of one of the soldiers who knew him best began ringing off the hook.
Retired Command Master Sgt. Joe Allen and Austin first met at Fort Bragg, N.C., more than 30 years ago. They’ve deployed to Iraq together multiple times, from the start of operations to the final drawdown of forces. Their wives were close friends. They both rose up the ranks as Black men when promotions for minorities were rare.
The phone calls to Allen were veterans or civilian staff who served under Austin and wanted to work for their old boss again.
“You would think that I was in charge of hiring and firing,” Allen said in an interview with McClatchy. “That’s how many phone calls I get.”
Allen met Austin while both were serving at Fort Bragg in the mid-1990s with the 82nd Airborne Division.
Austin made an impression on Allen early, when as a brigade commander he led Allen’s unit in a competitive exercise against the military’s premiere “opposition force” at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, La.
“They know all the rules and it’s in their backyard. So you don’t go in there and beat those guys. That’s their turf, right?” Allen said.
“We kicked the OPFOR (opposing force) so bad they were like, ‘who is this guy?’ That’s when you knew that Gen. Austin was someone special.”
When the exercise was over, Austin made an impression again, taking the time to visit and personally hand out awards to soldiers in each battalion of his brigade.
“Nobody did that,” Allen said. “He could have held a mass formation” to announce awards all at once, Allen said. “He actually went to every battalion to make sure he recognized soldiers.”
In Iraq, Austin would show the same characteristic, determined that either he or Allen, the senior enlisted leader in that country, would attend the on-base memorial services for any soldier killed.
“We made sure that no matter how far it was, we traveled to where those soldiers were,” Allen said. “And we hugged those soldiers that were quiet and in deep grief about losing their friends and their comrades.”
“They loved him for that, you know.”
On Tuesday, Austin testified before the Senate on his nomination to become the nation’s first Black defense secretary. He stressed that his 41 years in uniform and the close ties forged from that service — many of those years spent at Fort Bragg — would inform his leadership, but would not prevent him from seeking guidance from outside the ranks.
In the weeks since his nomination, lawmakers have questioned whether Austin would be too heavily influenced by his military experience and relationships to give equal consideration to civilian views, a concern Austin tried to address in his answers to lawmakers.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., referring to a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last week on civil-military relations said one of the concerns raised by having a career military officer fill the top civilian post was that it created “an over-deference to military views” when shaping defense policy
“I hope this hearing will earn me your trust,” Austin said. “I understand and respect the reservations some of you have expressed about having another recently retired general at the head of the Department of Defense.”
Austin would be the second general in recent years, following former Defense Secretary James Mattis, to require a waiver from Congress to serve due to a restriction that requires former military officers to be retired for seven years prior to serving as the Pentagon’s top civilian official.
If confirmed, Austin will take over a Pentagon that faces a myriad of challenges, from its role in the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, the impact of several years of upheaval among its senior civilian leadership and questions about extremist views in the ranks, following the participation of veterans and active duty service members in the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
In his testimony, Austin said his foremost concern is the pandemic, but that he would also be focused on extremism.
“The job of the Department of Defense is to keep America safe from our enemies,” Austin told the senators. “But we can’t do that if some of those enemies lie within our own ranks.”
Austin was a junior officer at Fort Bragg in 1995 when three 82nd Airborne Division soldiers murdered a Black couple in Fayetteville.
“We woke up one day and realized we had extremist elements in our ranks,” said Austin, after it was discovered the three soldiers were skinheads who had collected Neo-Nazi and white supremacist paraphernalia.
In the investigation that followed, “we discovered that the signs for that activity were there all along,” Austin told the senators. “We just didn’t know what to look for, or what to pay attention to, but we learned from that.”
“We can never take our hands off the wheel on this,” Austin said.
As their careers progressed, Allen’s and Austin’s paths overlapped multiple times during the Iraq war. Austin’s wife Charlene, and Allen’s late wife Patricia became close and “would talk and carry on like they were blood sisters,” Allen said.
In 2010, Allen was back at Fort Bragg, finishing his final assignment with XVIII Airborne Corps. He was getting ready to retire, until his aide told him that Austin was on the phone.
“[Austin] said, ‘Hey, Airborne buddy, you got another run in you?” Allen said.
Allen knew by the request that Austin was about to be tapped again to lead all U.S. military forces in Iraq.
“We were going back down range again, another 16 months,” Allen said. “I was ready to retire. But there’s nowhere on this earth - I told him - I’m not letting you go back over there by yourself.”
It’s a reflection of the loyalty and respect Austin has garnered from his three commands in Iraq, his deployment to Afghanistan and his history-making role as the first Black general to lead U.S. Central Command, Allen said.
It’s that tight knit unity however that worries some lawmakers who have cautioned against having another recently-retired general lead the Pentagon.
In 2016 a Republican congressional investigation into whether or not intelligence products were altered during Austin’s leadership of Central Command to support a more positive view of progress against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, found that edits resulted in products that no longer reflected senior civilian analysts’ views and created assessments that were “typically more optimistic than actual events warranted.”
A separate Department of Defense Inspector General report did not find any “intentional distortion of intelligence” but did find that word changes made to the analysts’ assessments led to the belief that “leadership did not trust the analysts and wanted to control the ‘narrative.’”
In the inspector general report, it noted that witnesses it interviewed though Austin was the source of the pressure to make the assessments more positive.
Austin denied influencing the intelligence at the time, and in his opening remarks to the senators said he intended to surround himself with civilian expertise and would work to “rebalance collaboration and coordination” between the Pentagon’s uniformed officers and civilian leaders “to ensure civilian input is integrated at every level of the process.”
This story was originally published January 19, 2021 at 5:22 PM with the headline "Austin carries close ties to Fort Bragg with him as he rises to Pentagon’s top post."
