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President Joe Biden has nominated Maj. Gen. Jonathan M. Stubbs, the adjutant general of Arkansas, to be the next director of the Army National Guard, the Pentagon announced July 10.
If confirmed, Stubbs would receive a third star and become responsible for overseeing all of the federal programs and policies affecting the Army Guard's 325,000 members.
Stubbs would succeed Lt. Gen. Jon A. Jensen, who has been the director of the Army Guard since August 2020. Jensen is set to retire Aug. 5.
A career Army Guard officer, Stubbs has spent more than 27 of his 29 years in uniform with the Arkansas Army Guard.
After two years as an enlisted soldier in the Tennessee Army Guard, he commissioned as an infantry officer in 1995 after completing officer candidate school as a distinguished graduate of the Tennessee Military Academy.
Stubbs has held every leadership position within the 39th Infantry Brigade Combat Team from rifle platoon leader to brigade commander.
He led Company C, 3rd Battalion, 153rd Infantry Regiment in Baghdad, Iraq, during Operation Iraqi Freedom II from 2004 to 2005. He was also the brigade’s operations officer in Baghdad during OIF VIII in 2008.
Stubbs also served as an Active Guard Reserve officer in the Arkansas Army Guard from 1997 to 2021, where he completed various training and administrative assignments. His last staff assignment was as chief of staff for the Arkansas Army Guard.
He was promoted to brigadier general in September 2021 and assigned as the vice director of operations at the National Guard Bureau in Arlington, Virginia, with a follow-on assignment in January 2022 as deputy director for operations, readiness and mobilization in the Department of the Army at the Pentagon.
In January 2023, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders appointed Stubbs as the state’s adjutant general, a assignment that came with a promotion to major general.
The position of Army Guard director is one of four senior NGB posts that must be filled this summer.
The bureau started the year with Gen. Daniel R. Hokanson as NGB chief, Lt. Gen. Marc H. Sasseville as NGB vice chief, Jensen as Army Guard director and Lt. Gen. Michael A. Loh as Air Guard director.
All four NGB leaders have either retired or will soon as they all began four-year terms in July or August 2020.
But Biden has only nominated successors for two of the positions — Maj. Gen. Duke A. Pirak, of Oregon, to succeed Loh, who retired in June, and Stubbs to take over for Jensen.
Sasseville retired in May and Hokanson is set to retire Aug. 1.
There are no timetables for when Biden will make additional military nominations or how quickly the Senate will move to confirm his picks.
Pirak was nominated in March.
The Congressional Calendar now becomes a concern.
The Senate — which already has a crowded agenda — now has only nine working days to vet and confirm recent or forthcoming nominees before its scheduled departure for the annual August recess.
Per the Senate's current schedule, the upper chamber is set to return for a few days in September, but the focus will likely then be on passing fiscal 2025 spending bills or a stopgap budget to keep the federal government running when the new fiscal year begins Oct. 1.
After Oct. 1, both chambers do not return to Capitol Hill until Nov. 12.
At issue for NGB is that any vacated posts must be filled by officers serving in a temporary or "acting" capacity.
These temporary or "acting" officers often lack the rank and full authority necessary to effectively carry out all the full requirements of their position.
Retired Maj. Gen. Francis M. McGinn, the NGAUS president, wrote a July 1 letter to the chairman and the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, urging them to expedite the approval process for the Guard officers currently in the confirmation pipeline.
— By John Goheen
