Meet the new boss…
February 22, 2025
On President Trump’s Truth Social platform, he said that: “I am nominating Air Force Lieutenant General Dan ‘Razin’ Caine to be the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Caine is an accomplished pilot, national security expert, successful entrepreneur, and a ‘warfighter’ with significant interagency and special operations experience.”
According to his official Air Force biography, Caine was a part-time member of the National Guard and “a serial entrepreneur and investor” from 2009 to 2016.
He served as the associate director for military affairs at the Central Intelligence Agency, before his retirement late last year, after which he who joined the venture capital firm Shield Capital.
As a retired officer, and one who only achieved three-star rank, Caine is nominally not qualified to serve as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, while it is not usual to have two air force officers in the role ‘back-to-back’.
The 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act states that to be qualified, a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff must have served previously as either the vice-chair, as a combatant commander or a service chief. Caine has done none of these jobs. The act does allow that these requirements could be waived if the “president determines such action is necessary in the national interest.”
It is not clear whether Caine will be appointed as a civilian or will return to military service, though a civilian CJCS would be unprecedented.
The chairman is the highest-ranking and most senior military officer in the United States Armed Forces and acts as the principal military advisor to the president, the National Security Council, the Homeland Security Council, and the secretary of defense. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff outranks all other commissioned officers, but is prohibited by law from having operational command authority over the armed forces, instead assisting the president and the secretary of defense in exercising their command functions.
It seems most likely that President Trump will recall the retired officer to active duty, promote him to four star rank, and then nominate him as the Chairman, which will require a full Senate confirmation process.
There are contradictory reports as to how ‘political’ General Caine is.
Britain’s Independent newspaper said that “A senior US military official who has worked with Caine for more than a decade said he would seek to keep the military out of politics.
Caine “puts the mission and troops above politics. He is not a political guy,” the newspaper reported the official as saying.
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s new SecDef observed that: “General Caine embodies the warfighter ethos and is exactly the leader we need to meet the moment. I look forward to working with him.”
Others distrust President Trump’s motives in ‘hiring’ General Caine. Trump has praised the General many times since meeting him in Iraq in 2018. Describing that first meeting in Iraq, Trump said that Caine was in the hangar where service members started putting on ‘Make America Great Again’ hats.
“They all put on the Make America Great Again hat. I said, ‘you’re not supposed to do that. You know that.’ They said, ‘It’s OK, sir. We don’t care.” Trump also said that Caine had put on a MAGA hat himself, and said: “I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir.”
Trump said that Caine had been “passed over for promotion by Sleepy Joe Biden. But not anymore!”
