MUSKO NAVAL BASE, SWEDEN — Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III on Wednesday defended the Pentagon policy to allow young enlisted service members access to sensitive national security secrets and downplayed whether a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman accused of leaking top secret documents should have been allowed access to them in the first place.
That question of why the Pentagon would allow a junior-ranking enlistee the clearance to view secret war plans for Ukraine has dogged the Defense Department since Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira was arrested last week.
Confronted with the question during a news conference Wednesday in Sweden, Mr. Austin said that age is not the issue. “The vast majority of our military is young,” he said. “So it’s not exceptional that young people are doing important things in the military.”
Airman Teixeira, Mr. Austin noted, had top-secret clearance as part of his job as a computer specialist in an intelligence unit of the Massachusetts Air National Guard.
“The issue is how you responsibly execute or carry out your duties and how you protect the information,” Mr. Austin said. “All of us have a requirement to do that, and supervisors have a requirement to make sure that’s being done.”
Mr. Austin’s comments were the first time a senior Pentagon leader has, in a public setting, spoken about whether the military is entrusting too much responsibility to service members at too young an age. Military leaders have long maintained that if you are old enough to die for the country, you are old enough to do any number of jobs in the military.
Whether Airman Teixeira’s case sparks a wider reckoning on age and sensitive material remains unclear.
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has directed the service’s inspector general to look at the Air National Guard 102nd Intelligence Wing, where Airman Teixeira served, and at how Airman Teixeira was able to post hundreds of national security documents into a chat room for gamers. From there, they eventually drifted to Twitter and the Telegram messaging platform.
