Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will bid farewell Friday to the forces and personnel he has led through a tumultuous term that had three major military crises, a global pandemic and a personal brush with cancer that became a flashpoint for the way it was mishandled.
Austin, 71, spent 41 years of his life in a military uniform. He retired as a highly decorated four-star general who earned a Silver Star — an award given for gallantry in action — for leading troops from the front in the initial 2003 invasion of Iraq.
He is one of the many Pentagon leaders who have served in combat and has “dust on his boots” — something President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has falsely claimed is his distinction and why he is needed to restore a military hollowed out by “woke” diversity initiatives.
“There have been a lot of narratives out there about how capable, how weak our military is,” Austin said in an interview with The Associated Press. “You’ve just got to look at the things we have done, that we continue to do, at a moment’s notice.”
Austin retired from the Army in 2016 only to be asked to return to the Pentagon by President Joe Biden in 2021, making history as the nation’s first Black defense secretary.
He took the helm of the Pentagon at the height of COVID-19 and just weeks after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump’s supporters. His early months saw the department working through a divisive COVID-19 vaccine mandate for the force and a deep dive to determine whether there was a wider extremism problem in the ranks. More than 230 people with a military background were arrested in connection with the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection.
Austin repeatedly said he believed extremism was not a problem. Indeed, service members and veterans who radicalize make up a tiny fraction of a percentage point of the millions who have honorably served, though an Associated Press investigation last year found it was on the rise.
But it would be the shocking collapse of the Afghan government to the Taliban that would forever mar Austin’s tenure. The U.S. withdrawal had been previously negotiated by Trump, and, because of that, there were only 2,500 U.S. forces in Afghanistan when Biden took office.
To this day, there’s a deep sense of betrayal among some veterans over the loss of Afghanistan, which became a key part of Trump’s return to office.
Biden’s decision to move forward with the withdrawal led to a chaotic two weeks in August 2021, when the Air Force evacuated more than 124,000 people from Afghanistan in just 17 days.
Air Force C-17s and chartered aircraft landed at Kabul airport in a non-stop operation, but then 13 U.S. service members and 170 Afghans were killed by a suicide bomber just days before the last U.S. service member left.
All the hard-won gains by women and for democracy began being dismantled by the Taliban.
“There was a lot of speculation on what would happen if we left Afghanistan. The world was going to come to an end. We were going to get attacked every day, and that just hasn’t happened,” Austin said. “Some horrible things have happened in terms of women’s rights. We’ll just have to continue to work on those things.”
The Biden administration was still reeling from the withdrawal when it began warning that Russian President Vladimir Putin was assembling hundreds of thousands of troops along Ukraine’s border and was preparing to invade. In response to the invasion, Austin created the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a coalition of more than 50 partner nations that have sent more than $126 billion in weapons and training to Kyiv in the three years since.
Then Hamas launched its Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel.
Austin directed two aircraft carriers to sail immediately to the region, and in the year since, the widened conflict has spilled into the Red Sea, disrupting trade and engaging the U.S. Navy in the most intense running sea battle since World War II.
The Navy has engaged not only drones but also anti-ship ballistic missiles fired by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen and ballistic missiles fired at Israel directly by Iran.
On one of Austin’s final days in office, the Defense Department’s inspector general released a report on his mishandling of his prostate cancer diagnosis in late 2023, when he failed to inform the White House of being hospitalized and incapacitated following complications with his treatment.
Austin is known as a deeply private man, and that desire for privacy came to a head in his diagnosis and hospitalization.
“I don’t want my health to be a media circus,” Austin texted his chief of staff while hospitalized. It became just that, and after revelations that he had not notified Congress for days that he was incapacitated, new processes were instituted to prevent the lack of notification from happening again.
Tara Copp is a Pentagon correspondent for the Associated Press. She was previously Pentagon bureau chief for Sightline Media Group.
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