Patrick Shanahan, 56, has played a prominent role in crafting a new National Defense Strategy placing renewed emphasis on military competition with Russia and China. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images Defense Meet Trump's acting Pentagon chief

When Defense Secretary Jim Mattis wanted him to be his top deputy, Patrick Shanahan was instructed to focus "down and in," as he describes the approach to managing the government's largest bureaucracy.

But the former Boeing executive who came to be known as "Mr. Fix-It" — by turning around troubled programs such as the 787 Dreamliner aircraft — will now need to be much more outward facing as President Donald Trump's acting Pentagon chief following the announcement Sunday that Mattis will depart Jan. 1, two months earlier than planned.


Job one will be repairing the relationship between the White House and the top ranks, where Mattis, who is leaving after a stunning public break with the commander-in-chief, is still revered.

Gordon Adams, a former Democratic White House budget official specializing in defense, called Shanahan "a perfectly competent manager."

"It is not clear how his competence will mesh with a president who is not," he added.

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Shanahan, who has been the Pentagon's No. 2 for 18 months, is little known outside the halls of the national security community — and even there his views are not well understood.

A mechanical engineer by training with scant policy background, the public record of his positions is slim compared to Mattis, a retired four-star Marine general.

“Imagine if we drew a Venn diagram of Secretary Mattis and his skills and background and history and overlaid mine with it,” Shanahan told an defense industry group earlier this year. “At the very edge they would touch, and it’s because we’re both from Washington state.”

Mattis clashed with Trump over a host of issues — including Iran; Russia; Syria; the wisdom of using the military to police the southern border; Trump's ban on transgender troops; and most prominently the president's denigration of historic military allies and diplomatic and trade partners.

As a trusted lieutenant, however, Shanahan, 56, has played a prominent role in crafting a new National Defense Strategy placing renewed emphasis on military competition with Russia and China — a document that Mattis considers one of his major accomplishments.

But Shanahan has also been the Pentagon's biggest booster for Trump's proposal for a separate Space Force, which is now in its final stages before going to Congress in early 2019.

Here's a rundown of some issues Shanahan has wrestled with in recent months and how his nomination to be deputy secretary was a bit choppy:

The Pentagon's space man

Shanahan has been the Pentagon's point person on efforts to reorganize the military space mission and a vocal champion of Trump's Space Force, which remains unpopular in many military quarters.

He's clashed with others in the department, including the Air Force, which would lose the most with the establishment of a new branch of the armed forces dedicated to space.

In November, he pushed back on a cost estimate floated by Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson projecting that standing up a Space Force would cost $13 billion over five years. Instead, he predicted a Space Force could cost less than $5 billion.

The budgeteer

In his role as the Pentagon's day-to-day manager, Shanahan has played a large role in building out the Pentagon's fiscal 2019 and 2020 budget requests, in addition to overseeing the crafting of a new National Defense Strategy.

After Trump called for federal agencies to cut their forthcoming budgets to blunt a deficit that's approaching $1 trillion, Shanahan said the Pentagon would prepare two fiscal 2020 spending plans — the originally planned $733 billion request and a lower $700 billion request — so the department wouldn't "reverse course on all that planning."

Ultimately, Trump reversed course and endorsed an even higher $750 billion defense budget request for the coming year.

Ties to the arms industry

His defense industry background raised red flags among lawmakers and others concerned about the Trump administration's reliance on executives from large defense contractors to staff numerous key Pentagon posts.

The late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) told Shanahan at his June 2017 confirmation hearing that he was "not overjoyed" with his previous industry work.

"I am concerned that 90 percent of defense spending is in the hands of the five corporations, of which you represent one," McCain told Shanahan. "I have to have confidence that the fox is not going to be put back into the hen house."

It's unclear what timeline the president has for nominating a permanent replacement for Mattis.

But after spending 30 years at Boeing overseeing commercial aircraft lines and several high-profile weapons contracts, Shanahan doesn't sound like he wants to return anytime soon.

Asked this fall about how he's made the transition from the corporate world, he remarked: “I tell people it's like breaking up with your long-time girlfriend and finding the love of your life."

Bryan Bender and Gregory Hellman contributed to this report.