'No one has confidence' in Biden, Austin amid foreign wars: Kash Patel

Former Department of Defense chief of staff Kash Patel on Friday excoriated Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin over his unannounced hospitalization, contending that the recent strikes on U.S. forces in the Middle East and the subsequent U.S. retaliations were in part the result of his breaking the chain of command.

Speaking on the "Just the News, No Noise" television show, Patel insisted that "when you have a Secretary of Defense who lies to the world and breaks the chain of command, and isn't in his office for four or five weeks, this is what happens."

Austin in early January was hospitalized due to complications from a prior surgery. He failed to notify the White House and public for several days and has since apologized for not notifying President Joe Biden. 

"And no one has confidence in anything these two say," Patel went on. "And that's just not how it was in a Donald Trump presidency. I mean, that's all you have to ask yourself. Think if one of these instances occurred in the Trump presidency - one, one of the 165 rocket attacks, what would the media be saying?"

The U.S. on Friday conducted strikes against Iranian-backed groups in Iraq and Syria in retaliation for a drone strike that killed U.S. troops in Jordan earlier this week. Patel went on to highlight the influence of defense contractors on U.S. policy in the event of an expanding conflict, highlighting Austin's prior service on the board of Raytheon.

"I'm not knocking the work those companies do. I am knocking the suffocating stranglehold they have on Washington, D.C., through the defense industrial complex by just money. And all they want to do is print it," Patel said. "And now at a time of multiple wars, the defense industrial complex is going to be more powerful than ever, and you have reckless statements coming from people in the house and in the Senate about going to war full-on."

"I don't think many of these people recognize what war actually means. Just ask the families who are going to do a dignified transfer, the return of their loved ones who died, because Joe Biden and Secretary Austin couldn't figure out what intelligence to utilize and who to strike and where the enemy was, because they were both literally sleeping," Patel concluded.

Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter.