Lt. Gen. John Allen to lead in Afghanistan - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Lt. Gen. John Allen to lead in Afghanistan

Marine Lt. Gen. John Allen will be nominated to replace Army Gen. David Petraeus in Afghanistan and is expected to take command by September, a senior White House official said Wednesday.

Allen will leave his position as deputy commanding general of U.S. Central Command, where he has been since July 2008, and become special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington for the next few months.

During that time, the official said, Allen will “work through the transition, he’ll spend quite a bit of time in Afghanistan and assuming Senate confirmation, will take command in the beginning of September.”

In confirmed by the Senate, Allen would become the first Marine Corps general at the helm of U.S. operations in Afghanistan since operations began there in October 2001.

The official also announced that Petraeus will be nominated to become the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency and would retire to take the job; Leon Panetta, the current CIA director, has been tapped to be the next secretary of defense and would replace Robert Gates this summer; and Ryan Crocker will replace retired Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry as U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan.

When Petraeus was tapped to replace Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal as commander of International Security Assistance Force and commander of U.S. Forces-Afghanistan in June 2010, Allen became interim commander of U.S. Central Command and is now working under its new commander, Gen. James Mattis.

According to the official, Allen was the first choice nominee of Gates, Joint Chiefs chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, Mattis and Petraeus.

“We are very familiar with him here at the White House, we have spent [tons] of hours working with Allen on some of the toughest problems in his area of operations, including Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran,” the official said.

Allen is a 1976 graduate of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.