Sullivan secretly blocked nomination of Air Force chief of staff since early May

Sen. Dan Sullivan gave a speech to a nearly empty U.S. Senate chamber in favor of the nomination of Gen. Charles Q. Brown to be chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force Tuesday.

Sullivan praised Brown at length as the right man at the right time for the job.

But Sullivan forgot to mention anything about Sullivan putting a secret hold on Brown's nomination last month, trying to pressure Brown to get KC-46 refueling tankers assigned to Eielson Air Force Base. In his speech, Sullivan should have explained why he chose to delay the nomination without telling the public or why he decided to lift the hold.

Did he get a secret promise and is that why he lifted his hold? Or did he realize how bad this would look once it was no longer a secret?

As the Air Force Magazine put it after Senate decision, “Parochial concerns delayed the confirmation vote.”

Boeing is building 15 KC-46 tankers per year, a project plagued by cost overruns. The tankers are still undergoing testing and the Air Force said Tuesday it has delayed a full operational decision until fiscal year 2024.

The Senate vote on Brown was unanimous. There was no question it would be that way as soon as Sullivan lifted his secret hold. For him to act as the champion of the nomination without mentioning his stall tactic is dishonest.

Defense News broke the story last week on Sullivan's move to delay Brown's nomination. Sullivan only confirmed it after the story appeared. Alaska news organizations haven't covered this.

Eielson Air Force Base is one of four installations in the Asia-Pacific region in the running to host the KC-46 tankers. Sullivan said it’s a no-brainer that the tankers belong in Alaska. At his confirmation hearing, Brown did not challenge Sullivan at all, but perhaps Sullivan wanted a secret guarantee from the nominee.

During the hearing, Brown said, “I agree that we should base the KC-46 in the places that give us the most flexibility.”

“The Alaska Republican established the hold shortly after Brown’s confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee in early May, preventing his nomination from moving forward, according to three sources with knowledge of the matter,” Defense News reported last week.

“The weeks-long delay for Brown’s historic confirmation vote has flown under the radar amid other controversies surrounding Trump’s involvement of the military as a response to protests and violence around the country — and as the Pentagon wrestles with its own sensitivities to racial issues,” Defense News said.

After the story appeared, Sullivan told Defense News Brown had been “cleared hot,” a bit of military jargon that means cleared to fire your weapon.

“You probably saw the confirmation hearing. I had some follow up questions on it. They got back to me now and so he’s cleared hot,” he said. “You know the nomination process, you’ve seen that I take it very seriously. The questions I asked are serious and then when we have questions for the record, they’ve got to be answered appropriately. So we’re just going through that. And we got there, so yeah he’s cleared hot,” Sullivan said.

What are the questions answered inappropriately in public by Brown that were later answered appropriately to Sullivan in secret? Based on the transcript of the hearing, it’s impossible to tell what Sullivan found so objectionable in Brown’s answers.

Did he lift the hold because it was damaging the Republican Senate to delay consideration of the first African-American to lead a branch of the service? Or because Brown made an “appropriate” secret promise to put the KC-46 planes at Eielson?

Sullivan is “cleared hot” to reveal what really happened.

On June 5, Brown delivered an impassioned five-minute address about what it means to be an African-American, what it means to be in the Air Force and the challenges facing our nation. “Here’s what I’m thinking about” is something that every American should watch.