The National Guard is set to get a new leader following a nearly two-month vacancy after the Senate approved the service component’s next chief.
As part of a batch of military confirmations, the Senate voted by voice Tuesday night to confirm Lt. Gen. Steven Nordhaus as chief of the National Guard Bureau and to give him a fourth star, clearing the deck of top military promotions ahead of a six-week congressional break to campaign for November’s elections.
The tranche of approved nominees also included Lt. Gen. Ronald Clark, whose promotion Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., had been delaying over the controversy surrounding Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s initially secret hospitalization earlier this year.
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The nominations approved Tuesday also included new leaders for U.S. Southern Command, Transportation Command and U.S. Forces Korea.
The National Guard has been without a Senate-confirmed leader since the beginning of August, when previous chief Gen. Daniel Hokanson’s term expired. The White House nominated Nordhaus just a week before Hokanson’s retirement and shortly before the Senate started a five-week summer recess, leaving little time for him to be confirmed before a vacancy.
While the bureau has been led by an acting chief in the interim, it lacked a leader with the weight of Senate confirmation at the height of hurricane and wildfire season, when state governors are calling up their National Guards to respond to the destruction from the natural disasters. Leadership in the National Guard Bureau plays a key role in coordinating and communicating between national and state officials, and the chief sits on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Nordhaus, who has been a senior commander at the North American Aerospace Defense Command since March 2023, will take the helm of the National Guard at a time when the service component has been increasingly relied upon for a broad range of missions, some of which are far outside its normal scope. In addition to having to respond to natural disasters that are more frequent and more destructive because of climate change, the Guard has also been tapped by governors to fill labor shortages completely unrelated to military training such as school bus drivers and corrections officers.
At Nordhaus’ confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month, lawmakers in both parties expressed concern about the Guard being stretched thin by non-military missions, a worry he indicated he shares.
Nordhaus also echoed concerns that Hokanson raised before his retirement that the Guard’s mission of helping patrol the U.S.-Mexico border is hindering its ability to prepare for warfighting.
“They’re not back home training for great power competition missions. They’re not back home with their families and their employers getting set up so that, the next time they’re asked to deploy overseas for a combat role, they have that spin for the National Guard,” Nordhaus said of the Guardsmen deployed to the border.
While Nordhaus has now been confirmed, there are still leadership gaps at the National Guard Bureau. The batch of nominees approved Tuesday did not include Maj. Gen. Duke Pirak, who has been nominated to be director of the Air National Guard.
The bureau has also lacked a Senate-confirmed vice chief since the previous one retired in May. A replacement has yet to be nominated.
Separately, Tuberville had been delaying Clark’s nomination for a fourth star and to be commander of U.S. Army Pacific over what the senator described as concerns that Clark should have notified the White House when Austin was rushed to the hospital at the beginning of the year for complications from an earlier prostate cancer surgery. Both the January hospitalization and prostate cancer diagnosis were initially kept secret from the White House, Congress and the public. Clark is currently Austin’s senior military assistant and was in that role at the time of the hospitalization as well.
Tuberville had said he would delay Clark’s promotion at least until the completion of an inspector general investigation into the hospitalization episode. But he relented after a meeting with Clark on Tuesday, Tuberville’s office confirmed Wednesday.
“After a detailed discussion, Senator Tuberville dropped his hold,” Mallory Jaspers, a spokesperson for Tuberville, said in an emailed statement. “While there were certainly failures elsewhere, the senator is confident that LTG Clark more than fulfilled his duties during the secretary’s hospitalization. Senator Tuberville is thankful for LTG Clark’s many decades of service to our nation and wishes he and his family the best in his new assignment.”
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