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"He's a real general"/ Who is Dan Caine, Trump's pick as the top American military officer?

2025-02-22 12:33:00, Kosova & Bota CNA

"He's a real general"/ Who is Dan Caine, Trump's pick as the

Dan Caine may not have been on Washington's radar before Friday night. But President Donald Trump made a surprising choice to nominate him as Joint Chiefs of Staff, seemingly going back to their first meeting in Iraq in 2018.

This choice seems to take us back to their first meeting in Iraq in 2018.

Caine, then deputy commander of a special operations task force fighting the Islamic State, told the president that the militant group could be destroyed in just a week, Trump recalled during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2019.

Since then, he has retold the story of how he met “Razin” Caine many times – and the praise spread further.

“He’s a real general, not a TV general,” Trump said in Miami on Wednesday, two days before his “Truth Social” post catapulted Caine from retirement to an appointment to be the highest-ranking active-duty officer in the U.S. military.

If confirmed by the Senate, Caine will take over an Army reeling from change in the first 30 days of the Trump administration and inherit a Joint Chiefs of Staff shaken by the surprise firing of Air Force General CQ Brown.

Caine, a retired F-16 pilot, will be promoted to four-star general and then must undergo a potentially grueling Senate confirmation process to receive a four-year term as the uniformed head of the nation's military.

Caine's military career is a far cry from the traditional path to becoming the president's top military advisor.

Previous generals and admirals have led a combatant command or a military branch of service.

Caine didn't rise that high in rank before retirement.

Earlier this year Caine described in a podcast how as a young man he wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father, a fighter pilot.

He graduated in 1990 from Virginia Military Institute with a bachelor's degree in Arts and Economics.

Caine, who flew more than 2,800 hours in the F-16, was one of the pilots tasked with protecting Washington on September 11, 2001, when Al Qaeda hijackers crashed commercial airliners into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York.

Caine held a number of positions in the capital since 2005.

He was special assistant to the secretary at the Department of Agriculture and then director of counterterrorism policy at the White House Homeland Security Council.

According to his official Air Force biography, Caine was a part-time member of the National Guard and “a serial entrepreneur and investor” from 2009 to 2016.

He was most recently the associate director for military affairs at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), before retiring late last year./ CNA