President-elect Joe Biden has selected retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, the former commander of US Central Command, to be his secretary of defense.
If confirmed by the Senate, Austin would be the first Black man to lead the Department of Defense.
Austin is a 1975 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and served 41 years in uniform.
Biden has known Austin at least since the general’s years leading U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq while Biden was vice president.
Austin was commander in Baghdad of the Multinational Corps-Iraq in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected president, and he returned to lead U.S. troops from 2010 through 2011.
Austin also served in 2012 as the first Black vice chief of staff of the Army, the service’s No. 2-ranking position.
A year later he assumed command of U.S. Central Command, where he fashioned and began implementing a U.S. military strategy for rolling back the Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria.
Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III salutes during the playing of the national anthem after returning the United States Forces – Iraq colors to the U.S., Dec. 20, 2011, at Joint Base Andrews, Md.
Austin retired from the Army in 2016, and he would need a congressional waiver of the legal requirement that a former member of the military be out of uniform at least seven years before serving as secretary of defense.
That waiver has been granted only twice — most recently in the case of James Mattis, the retired Marine general who served as President Trump’s first Pentagon chief.
Some Democrats in Congress at the time expressed concerns about setting aside the precedent of maintaining civilian leadership in the military, but the waiver was ultimate approved by both chambers, allowing Mattis to serve in the position until his departure in December 2018.
The expected announcement would come two weeks after Biden rolled out key members of his foreign policy and national security teams, including the first woman to lead the US intelligence community and first Latino to helm the Department of Homeland Security.
Biden named Avril Haines, a former top CIA official and deputy national security adviser, to lead the US intelligence community; Alejandro Mayorkas, a former deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, as Homeland Security secretary; Antony Blinken, his top foreign policy aide, as secretary of state; and Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a career foreign service official, to be the US ambassador to the United Nations.
He also tapped Jake Sullivan, a former Obama administration official, to serve as his national security adviser, and former Secretary of State John Kerry to serve as climate czar.