"The military, he [Golby] said, 'understands what is at stake and remains committed to carrying out its duties in a nonpartisan manner.'" Golby also reassured that the military is accustomed to carrying out orders individuals may not agree with.
In "What Should Be Addressed in Austin’s Confirmation Hearing for Defense Secretary?", Senior Fellow Jim Golby considers the challenging questions General Lloyd Austin will face during his upcoming confirmation hearing to become defense secretary.
“He’ll likely get some tough challenges for his role in the drawdown of troops from Iraq, as Democrats and Republicans view it differently,” said Jim Golby, a senior fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin and a former special assistant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“But at the same time, Austin can say he was operating under civilian control during the drawdown in 2011 and wasn’t making those decisions — and he carried out an extremely complex logistical effort during that drawdown and led during the U.S. response to ISIS,” Golby said.
In this episode of Horns of a Dilemma, Will Inboden, executive director at the Clements Center at the University of Texas at Austin, sits down with David Adesnik and John Hannah from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, to discuss their recent work, “From Trump to Biden: The Way Ahead for United States National Security.” Inboden and the authors identify the successes and failures of Donald Trump’s foreign policy. The discussion serves to shine a light on areas where there are opportunities for a bipartisan consensus in foreign policy going forward.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies recently released Maintaining the Intelligence Edge: Reimagining and Reinventing Intelligence Through Innovation, the final report of a year-long Task Force convened to study the opportunities and obstacles to integrating emerging technologies into intelligence missions. The Task Force report and a link to the January 14, 2021 (virtual) briefing by the Task Force staff and commissioners is available HERE.
© Clements Center for National Security 2019