US defense secretary Lloyd Austin's secret hospitalization: All you need to know

According to two defense officials, the deputy secretary of defense did not even realize that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin had been hospitalized when she started taking on some of his duties on January 2. Until Thursday, three days after the secretary checked into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center due to complications from an elective surgery, senior leaders, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, the Pentagon's second-in-command, were kept in the dark about Austin's actual location. As previously reported by CNN, Austin was hospitalized for three days before even the president learned of it.