General who helped Trump decimate ISIS terrorists confirmed as Joint Chiefs chairman

The Senate has voted to confirm Lt. Gen. John Daniel Caine as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a position previously held by Gen. C.Q. Brown. The vote took place in the early hours of Friday morning, with a tally of 60 to 25 in favor of Caine’s confirmation. This decision came after Democrats rejected a GOP attempt to expedite the confirmation process on Thursday.

Caine, an Air Force F-16 pilot by background, will be the first National Guard general to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. President Donald Trump brought Caine out of retirement to serve as his top military advisor after dismissing Gen. Brown in February. Brown had been responsible for laying out diversity goals for the Air Force in a 2022 memo.

Unlike his predecessors, Caine is not a four-star general and did not serve as a combatant commander or service chief. This required President Trump to grant him a waiver to fill the role of chairman of the Joint Chiefs. During a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Caine acknowledged his unconventional nomination by stating, “In our family, we serve. When asked, we always say yes. Senators, I acknowledge that I’m an unconventional nominee. These are unconventional times.”

Caine’s extensive background includes serving as the associate director of military affairs for the CIA, founding a regional airline in Texas, and working as a White House fellow at the Agriculture Department. He was also a counterterrorism specialist on the White House’s Homeland Security Council. Caine was part of a group of military leaders who met with President Trump in December 2018 at the Al Asad airbase in Iraq, where he proposed a strategy to quickly eradicate ISIS with a surge of resources and loosened rules of engagement.

President Trump praised Caine as “an accomplished pilot, national security expert, successful entrepreneur, and a ‘warfighter’ with significant interagency and special operations experience.” Caine has vowed to advise the president on defense considerations without any political influence, emphasizing the importance of being nonpartisan and apolitical in his duties as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

This confirmation marks a new chapter in the leadership of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with Caine becoming the first National Guard general and the first chairman to come out of retirement to fill the role. His diverse background and experience in various military and government positions will undoubtedly shape his approach to advising the president on national security and defense matters.