WASHINGTON: US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin is in hospital since Monday for an unspecified medical matter, the Pentagon said late on Friday, without detailing why he was being treated or why it kept his hospital stay secret all week.

Austin, who is 70, sits just below President Joe Biden at the top of the chain of command of the US military and his duties require him being available at a moment’s notice to respond to any manner of national security crisis.

The Pentagon did not say whether Lloyd Austin ever lost consciousness before or after he was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Jan 1, or the extent to which his duties were assumed by his deputy, Kathleen Hicks.

Those duties include being ready and available to respond to an incoming nuclear attack.

The Pentagon said Austin suffered “complications following a recent elective medical procedure”.

“He is recovering well and is expecting to resume his full duties today,” Maj Gen Patrick Ryder, the top Pentagon spokesperson, said in a statement on Friday.

Just a day earlier, Ryder held a televised news briefing that conveyed the sense of business as usual at the Pentagon, offering Austin’s condolences to Japan following a new year’s day earthquake, for example.

But the past week has been anything but normal for the Pentagon, with US troops in the Middle East wrestling with the regional fallout from the unfolding crisis in Gaza and carrying out a retaliatory strike in Baghdad on Thursday.

No claim to privacy

The Pentagon Press Association, in a letter to Pentagon officials, criticised the Defence Depart­ment’s secrecy, saying that Austin was a public figure who had no claim to medical privacy in such a situation.

“At a time when there are growing threats to US military service members in the Middle East and the US is playing key national security roles in the wars in Israel and Ukraine, it is particularly critical for the American public to be informed about the health status and decision-making ability of its top defence leader,” it wrote.

The Pentagon Press Association letter noted that even US presidents disclose when they must delegate duties due to medical procedures.

The way the Defence Department handled Austin’s hospitalisation stands in contrast to how the State Department dealt with then-secretary of state Colin Powell’s surgery on Dec 15, 2003.

The State Department spokesman at that time issued a statement in the morning making public that Powell, a retired four-star general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was in surgery at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and would remain there for several days before returning home.

Published in Dawn, January 7th, 2024