I'm John Bachelore with Elizabeth Peek of the Hill,

a commerce of Fox News, a columnist,

and a new column Liz you have up about Secretary Austin and his hospitalization.

We all wish him well, of course, but the mystery here is not the secretaries.

It's decision-making in wartime between the DoD and the the top brass in all the

military services and the National Security Council headed by Mr. Sullivan and the State Department

headed by Mr. Blinkin and the White House.

What can we discern so far from the incomplete information we have about the chain of reporting during wartime, during what you'd have to say

is violent action in the Red Sea. We have a couple of minutes. What have we discerned?

Well, first we don't know much and I mean that's the really shocking part of this story even as you and I are talking about this a couple of days after this was discovered that is to say the defense secretary went into the hospital into the intensive care unit and didn't tell anybody.

We still don't know why he's in the hospital, he still is in the hospital.

All of it is incredibly murky, but it's also very, very odd because this is a career military man who knows very well the chain of command. He knows totally that for him to be offline,

for his deputy to be handed his responsibilities

without knowing that he is offline,

that he's in the intensive care unit.

For the president not to know, it's extraordinary, John,

and I think, I think there have to,

there has to be a reason for this.

This is not something that Lloyd Austin did by mistake. My view is that he is perhaps

untrusting or distrustful of the people in the White House, Jake Sullivan, Anthony Blinkin, who, according to some reporting in political and elsewhere, have really grasped the reins of our military activities in a way that's pretty unusual and given

the lack of service record of those two people and their lack of, I would say,

military competence, I think must be very alarming

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