Trump will appoint Patrick Shanahan Secretary of Defense.

President Trump will appoint Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan to remain in office permanently, the White House announced on Thursday. Shanahan has been leading the Pentagon since the resignation of US Secretary Jim Mattis last December to protest against Trump's policies, particularly the president's decision to withdraw his troops from Syria. Shanahan, during his brief term, was more than willing to flatter the most impulsive instincts of Trump's foreign policy, including supporting the president's deployment of troops along the Mexican border and using Pentagon funds to pay a wall. "We are not the no department," Shanahan told Pentagon officials in response to Trump's desire to create a space force.

This kind of attitude is a music for Trump's ears. Critics of the appointment, however, point out that the former Boeing leader, 56, lacks the necessary foreign policy experience to fill the most sensitive position in the country's government. Shanahan was an assistant secretary of defense largely unknown. He had been recruited because of his private sector successes over three decades in the commercial aviation sector at Boeing, where he had helped save the failed production of the 787 Dreamliner.

"[Shanahan’s] The appointment was pending during the ethics review and after a second fatal accident in October of a Boeing commercial aircraft that raised questions about the manufacturer's close relationship with federal officials, "notes the New York Times. "The Inspector General's report, released last month, allowed Mr. Shanahan to profit from wrongdoing, but also referred to many meetings at the Pentagon during which officials of the Department of Defense stated that he had put forward his production problem solving experiments on the Dreamliner, techniques that the government should copy. "

"Although some members of the Senate brutally criticized Shanahan, he did not arouse broad opposition during his months of hearing for the nomination," reports the Associated Press. "Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, criticized Shanahan about the Syrian policy of administration, but the confrontation quickly faded after the White House reversed its course by agreeing to keep a few hundred soldiers in Syria rather than removing the 2,000 men.