Fort Liberty is a massive installation with more generals than any place outside of the Washington, D.C., area, some 38 general officer positions. One of the most visible of those positions is held by the commanding general of the XVIIIth Airborne Corps. When the U.S. has to deploy troops in a hurry, particularly to Europe or the Middle East, the call often comes to Fayetteville.
Its divisions include the 82nd Airborne at Fort Liberty; the 101st Airborne at Fort Campbell, Kentucky; the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Georgia, and the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum in upstate New York. So more than 80,000 troops, nearly a fifth of the active-duty Army, serve under the XVIIIth Corps commander.
Friday, I attended the change of command ceremony for the XVIIIth. Gen. Chris Donahue was leaving for a big new command in Europe, and the new XVIIIth Airborne commander would be Lt. Gen. Greg Anderson.
Donahue was confirmed by the U.S. Senate early last week for promotion to four-star general. That put him in a very small group. As of August, there were only 13 four-star generals in the active-duty Army, atop an officer corps numbering more than 92,400. Not quite 250 officers have gotten a fourth star in the history of the Army.
As a lieutenant general, Donahue had been commander of the XVIIIth Airborne and Fort Liberty since March 2022. He is now commanding general of U.S. Army Europe-Africa. His successor, Anderson, previously commanded the 10th Mountain Division.
The change of command ceremony was put together fast. Anderson was nominated to be XVIIIth Airborne commander last May. On Nov. 15, the Pentagon announced Donahue’s nomination to the Europe-Africa command and his fourth star.
But then Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin put a hold on the Donahue promotion, which a single senator can do. Mullin has been a critic of the Biden administration’s handling of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Donahue, then commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, was commander of U.S. troops in the final days in Afghanistan. In fact, he became famous for the picture of him as the last American soldier to leave Afghanistan, walking up the ramp of a C-17 at the airport in Kabul.
The Army didn’t say anything publicly when Mullin held up the Donahue promotion, but there was pushback. One Senate aide was quoted in Task & Purpose:
“Donahue is not a political guy at all. He’s an extremely apolitical person. If you wanted to create a badass American special operations general in a lab, it would spit out Donahue.”
Donahue has been a Delta Force commander, a Ranger and a combat veteran. In a 32-year career, he deployed 20 times in support of operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, North Africa, and Eastern Europe. He was director of operations for JSOC, the secretive Joint Special Operations Command based at Fort Liberty that plans and conducts special operations.
Donahue gets discussed as a future chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He is charismatic and a skilled communicator. His defenders said he didn’t make the decision to leave Afghanistan; the 82nd was sent to help manage the Kabul airport evacuations, so he was being unfairly targeted. Retired Gen. Tony Thomas, former commander of US Special Operations Command, went on X, formerly Twitter, to call Donahue the “Best combat commander in DOD!”
Mullin quietly lifted the hold on Dec. 2, Monday a week ago. The Senate quickly confirmed Donahue. Two days later, on Wednesday, came word from the XVIIIth Airborne that the change of command ceremony would be Friday. Things were moving fast, but moving fast is in the Corps’ DNA.
On Friday, we were gathered on the basketball court inside the Hercules Physical Fitness Center, near Pope Field, where generations of paratroopers have boarded planes for rapid deployment to all parts of the world.
Early in the ceremony, howitzers began firing outside the gym, six of them operated by Bravo Battery, 3-319th Airborne Field Artillery Regiment. Firing blanks, but they were loud. Because everything reminds me of something, I recalled that the government originally set up Fort Liberty, then called Camp Bragg, to train artillery at the end of World War I. After the war, the Army almost shut it down, but changed its mind, and in 1922, the War Department announced that it would be a permanent installation, called Fort Bragg. The first of what is today more than 5,700 buildings started going up on the 269-square-mile garrison in the Sandhills. Today, Fort Liberty has an $8.8 billion annual economic impact and is the largest Army base by population. The XVIIIth Airborne’s three-star general is the base’s overall commander.
Passing the colors
Command transfers in an instant. At Friday’s ceremony, three generals and a command sergeant major stood facing each other for the change of command process. The XVIII Airborne’s organizational colors, a symbol of the commander’s authority, were passed in sequence. The colors started with XVIIIth Airborne’s Command Sgt. Maj. Bryan Barker, who is their custodian. He passed them to Donahue, for the last time. Donahue then passed them to Gen. Andrew Poppas.
Poppas was the senior officer in the group, as the four-star commanding general of Army Forces Command, which, like the XVIIIth Airborne, is based at Fort Liberty. FORSCOM is the Army’s largest command, and is responsible for supplying land forces to the Department of Defense’s combatant commands.
Poppas passed the colors to Anderson. Then Anderson passed the colors back to Barker for safekeeping.
It was done. Command had changed.
And then there were speeches. Poppas described how different the last XVIIIth Airborne change of command was. Donahue – “CD” as he called him – accepted the colors as the new Corps commander in a small ceremony in Germany, 17 days after the Russians invaded Ukraine. U.S. troops were flowing to NATO outposts in Eastern Europe.
“Their presence alone galvanized NATO against Russian aggression,” said Poppas. “Since its activation in World War II, the XVIIIth has been the centerpiece of every major American contingency plan.”
He praised Donahue as a transformational leader, citing the Scarlet Dragon exercises focused on speed, scale and the use of data in warfighting. He talked about Donahue’s efforts to reduce excess equipment from the formation to make units more agile. “He led the charge in the Army’s transformation at contact . . . new technologies, new techniques at the speed of war.”
He spoke of Donahue’s ties to Fort Liberty, 18 years in different roles at the garrison. But Poppas also noted the sacrifice that an Army career requires of warfighters and their families, because almost a third of that time, Donahue was deployed.
For his part, Donahue spoke of the impact the XVIIIth and its units made in recent deployments, particularly in the aftermath of the Ukraine invasion. “They went out to Europe and figured out a mission that nobody would have ever thought they’d have before.”
“They came home and were told to do some work in the Sudan,” helping to evacuate Americans and our allies in the middle of civil strife.
One of the XVIIIth’s units, the 7th Transportation Brigade (Expeditionary), was sent to the waters off Gaza, “where they provided more humanitarian aid than any operations since the Berlin Airlift,” said Donahue. And he mentioned the recent efforts by the XVIIIth soldiers in western North Carolina to help victims of Hurricane Helene.
“This is our home,” he said of Fort Liberty. “This is where our children were born. This will always be who we are.”
The new commander
Anderson is a native of San Jose, California He graduated from West Point in 1991, and holds two master’s degrees.
He has deployed 17 times and has operational experience in Haiti, Panama, Bosnia, the Baltic states, Afghanistan, Iraq and Eastern Europe. His previous command positions were at 10th Mountain, 75th Ranger Regiment and the 173rd Infrantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne). He has more than seven years of joint assignments, including a deployment as the director for Joint Interagency Task Force West in Iraq. He and his wife, Luzane (Lu), have three sons, all of whom are serving in the active-duty Army.
