The Army officer who commanded troops of the 82nd Airborne Division in the chaotic final days of the Afghanistan withdrawal was given a late-night promotion to four-star general Monday. A Republican senator had held back the promotion of Gen. Christopher Donahue for over a week but released the hold Monday, allowing the Senate to confirm Donahue as the four-star commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa in a late-night vote.
Donahue’s confirmation had been held up by Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma. Mullin’s hold was viewed as a possible first salvo by Republicans toward enforcing President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to remake the Pentagon’s general officer corps, which Trump has said would begin with senior officers involved in the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Many former soldiers and defense officials came to Donahue’s defense, arguing he was an on-the-ground commander in Kabul sent to sort out a mess, not make policy.
“Donahue is not a political guy at all. He’s an extremely apolitical person,” a Senate aide told Task & Purpose last week. “If you wanted to create a badass American special operations general in a lab, it would spit out Donahue. He’s just not really the guy to go after for the political loyalty test.”
For most of his career, Donahue commanded troops in special operations before taking over a series of front-line commands of larger conventional units as a general. He had combat stints as a unit commander at the 75th Ranger Regiment and Delta Force along with staff roles at the Joint Chiefs in the Pentagon.
As a general, Donahue was the commander of the 82nd Airborne in 2021 when the division sent a rapid-response force to stabilize the Kabul airport in the last two weeks of the Afghanistan withdrawal. Donahue was the senior American officer on the ground during the withdrawal. The final days at the airport became a symbol of the war, with tactical successes — close to 125,000 Afghans and others were evacuated on a non-stop airlift — overshadowed by the strategic defeat of the war’s end and the deaths of 13 service members in a suicide bombing at the airport’s Abbey Gate.
A photo of Donahue boarding the final C-17 to leave the airport, taken through the green glow of a night vision device, became an iconic image of the war’s end.
After Kabul, Donahue was promoted to lieutenant general and took command of the XVIII Airborne Corps, the Army-wide command that oversees the service’s four quickest-deploying light infantry divisions: the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Liberty, North Carolina, the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Georgia; 10th Mountain Division, at Fort Drum, New York; and the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
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