WASHINGTON — Air Force Gen. Dan Caine^[1] has been sworn in as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff after a flurry of paperwork was finished to allow him to fill the job nearly two months after President Donald Trump fired his predecessor^[2].

A formal White House ceremony is expected to take place this week.

Caine, a decorated F-16 fighter pilot and well-respected officer, took over on Saturday after Trump signed the necessary documents. He will serve the remainder of the four-year term of Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr., who was fired by Trump as part of a broader purge of military officers^[3] believed to endorse diversity and equity programs.

Brown, a history-making fighter pilot and just the second Black chairman, had served 16 months in the job when he was fired Feb. 21. Caine's term as chairman will run through Sept. 30, 2027.

Because he has never served as a combatant commander or a service chief, Caine did not meet the basic prerequisites for the job set out in a 1986 law. As a result, Trump had to sign a waiver allowing him to serve as chairman. Under the law, the requirements can be waived by the president if there is a determination that “such action is necessary in the national interest.”

Caine — whose call sign is “Raizin” — is the first officer to be called back from retirement and returned to active duty to take the chairman’s job.

He had an unusual path to the chairman’s post, including his start in the military.

Caine was commissioned as an officer in 1990 through the ROTC program at the Virginia Military Institute, but after pilot training, he got a waiver to move from active duty to the Air National Guard so that he could fly fighter jets. At the time, there weren't as many open slots for pilots in the active duty service.

In 2001, while serving as a pilot with the 121st Fighter Squadron at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, he was in the second rotation of fighter jets that were patrolling the skies over Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11. Two months later, he deployed to Kuwait as an F-16 mission commander.

Caine got his master’s degree in 2005 from American Military University, in Charles Town, West Virginia. Much of his early military time was as a pilot and instructor, and he has 2,800 hours, including more than 100 in combat.

During his career, Caine moved in and out of full-time active duty jobs. He served in leadership roles in multiple special operations commands, in some of the Pentagon’s most classified programs and at the CIA. He also worked on staff and as a fellow at the White House.

His most recent job before he retired last year was as the associate director for military affairs at the CIA. He retired as a three-star lieutenant general.

The Senate confirmed Caine^[4] after 2 a.m. Friday, by a bipartisan vote of 60-25, with 15 Democrats and independent Sen. Angus King of Maine voting in support of his nomination.

Caine was in the Pentagon on Friday, but it was unclear when he would be sworn in because there appeared to be a delay in Trump signing the needed paperwork. Trump was at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, in Bethesda, Maryland, on Friday for his annual physical and then went directly to Joint Base Andrews to fly to Florida.

He signed the paperwork late that night. Caine was sworn in Saturday and was at the Pentagon over the weekend to start work. But as of Monday, the Joint Chiefs website still didn’t have him listed.

At his confirmation hearing early this month, Caine said he would be candid in his advice to Trump and vowed to be apolitical.

Asked how he would react if ordered to direct the military to do something potentially illegal, such as being used against civilians in domestic law enforcement, he told senators that it is “the duty and the job that I have” to push back.

Trump’s relationship with Caine dates to his first administration. They met during a trip to Iraq, as Trump recounted in a 2019 speech. He has said Caine is “a real general, not a television general.”

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Associated Press writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.

The Pentagon’s newest push to trim its workforce and spending could mean that on-base grocery stores and shops designed to save service members and their families money could ultimately be sold off to the private sector.

An April 7 memo signed by Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg^[1] listed a wide range of possible reforms aimed at "delivering maximum value to the warfighter." Among them included "all functions that are not inherently governmental (e.g. retail sales and recreation) should be prioritized for privatization."

A defense official familiar with the intent behind the memo told Military.com on Thursday that there weren't any off-limit areas for cuts or privatization. Commissaries, military-run hotels, and on-base welfare facilities were all fair game, they said.

Read Next: Commander of Greenland Base Who Broke with Vance Fired Shortly After Military.com Report^[2]

However, the official noted that it was up to the individual military services to bring forward suggestions and that just because something like a commissary^[3] is put forward for privatization doesn't automatically mean that it will be sold off.

"Everything is pre-decisional right now," the official said.

Privatizing aspects of the military's support services has a long and largely problematic history that has resulted in markedly poorer outcomes for service members while offering little in the way of savings for the Pentagon.

William "Bill" Moore, who served as the director and CEO of the Defense Commissary Agency, or DeCA, between 2020 and 2024, wrote in an opinion piece^[4] for the Ripon Society think tank last year that "privatizing commissaries is, quite simply, a bad idea."

Moore explained to Military.com in an interview Friday that funding from Congress helps subsidize the commissaries, allowing them to offer products much more affordably than other grocery stores.

"If you privatize without subsidy, I guarantee you, there is no way they will be able to save military families anything," Moore said. "I would be shocked if any for-profit company could take over the commissaries and deliver any benefit to military families beyond convenience. There's no way they could sell items at the prices the commissary could."

Commissaries have taken scrutiny in recent years. A 2022 Government Accountability office report critiqued the methodology for how the agency calculated some of its customer savings rates, describing it as "unreliable."

Moore told Military.com that they "fixed a lot of that" and were still working on improving those savings estimates up to his departure from DeCA.

While commissaries are nonprofit organizations by law, profits from military exchanges -- retail stores on military bases that sell a wide variety of products -- also get cycled into the Morale, Welfare and Recreation programs for service members and their families.

It was unclear how those recreation programs would be fully funded if exchanges were turned over to private companies, which would likely choose to pocket those profits.

Notably, some of the top leaders in the Trump administration have voiced their support for privatization efforts in the past.

Former Rep. Mike Waltz, now Trump's national security adviser, said during a House Armed Services Committee hearing last year that he wanted the military "out of the hotel management business" and said the private sector could do the job "incredibly well" when it came to base housing.

As cautionary tales of privatization go, the military's handover of family housing is a prime example. For decades, the arrangement has caused a raft of problems involving companies that manage the units where troops and their families live.

Balfour Beatty, a massive company that manages more than 40,000 military homes across more than 50 bases^[5], has repeatedly been sued and forced to pay restitution to military families for its consistent failure to ensure military homes in its care are safe and livable.

Two weeks ago, the company was hit with yet another lawsuit^[6] that alleged the company "concealed the horrific conditions from unsuspecting service men and women and their families" and then, "when these conditions were discovered and reported, Balfour systematically failed to properly repair and remediate significant problems."

However, the company's history of shoddy work goes back decades.

In 2019, Balfour Beatty was caught up in a nationwide scandal over squalid family housing and pleaded guilty in 2021 to falsifying maintenance records that went as far back as 2013. The company was ordered to pay $65.4 million in fines and restitution for misconduct related to its military housing practices in federal contracts.

And yet, despite that scandal and fine, in 2022, an eight-month investigation^[7] by a Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs panel found the company was continuing to ignore residents' concerns over mold, asbestos and other problems in their homes.

Balfour Beatty is not alone, though.

In 2020, families of Marines stationed at Camp Lejeune^[8], North Carolina, took several private companies that run housing on that base to court^[9] over their alleged failure to provide safe residences or respond to complaints of mold, mildew, water intrusion, roaches and maintenance problems.

That same year, nine Army^[10] families also sued their privatized base housing landlords^[11] at Fort Cavazos, Texas, over allegations of life-threatening levels of mold and "deplorable" conditions in their homes that ruined their belongings.

An Army family at the base was awarded $10.3 million^[12] in 2024 after they were forced to live in a mold-infested home run by a private Army housing company, leading to repeated hospitalizations of their newborn infant for respiratory difficulties.

Those issues have not stopped the military from trying to create new privatized housing solutions for troops. In September, Edwards Air Force Base^[13], California, broke ground on the service's first privatized on-base apartment complex.

Related: Military Families in Key West Sue Balfour Beatty over Allegations of Squalid, Toxic Housing Conditions^[14]