Trump and Hegseth’s Pentagon purge undermines the armed forces
How to damage military morale and recruiting? Trump and Hegseth seem to be trying to find out, alas.
In his first weeks in office, President Donald Trump did serious damage to America’s soft power by moving to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and defund the National Endowment for Democracy. Now he seems bent on damaging U.S. hard power, too.
In a Friday night massacre, Trump fired Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the second African American to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also fired Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the chief of naval operations, and Gen. James Slife, the vice chief of of staff the Air Force, along with the top lawyers — the judge advocates general — for the Air Force, Army and Navy. Another female officer — Adm. Linda Fagan, commandant of the Coast Guard, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security — was fired by the administration last month.
Hegseth justified this purge based on the supposed need to restore the U.S. military’s “warfighter ethos” and to stop focusing on DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion. But the actual message the moves might send is far more chilling: namely, that the armed forces should be run by White men, and (as made clear in the selection of Brown’s replacement as Joint Chiefs chairman) that those men will be chosen more for perceived political loyalty than for professional qualifications.
Those are highly corrosive signals to send, and they are likely to hamper the armed forces’ recruiting efforts and morale, given that about 18 percent of active-duty personnel are female and more than 30 percent are members of racial minorities. That’s all the more so because these changes are accompanied by promises of major cutbacks in programs and personnel. The Pentagon is firing thousands of civilian workers (many of them veterans), and Hegseth has demanded plans to cut the services’ budgets by 8 percent.
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Initially, he made this sound like an 8 percent cut in the overall defense budget, which would be disastrous at a time of growing threats from China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. Hegseth then clarified that it was an 8 percent cut from existing programs to be redirected into new priorities such as the “Iron Dome for America.”
But that is hardly more reassuring, since the Iron Dome plan to erect a ballistic missile defense across the entire country is an impractical boondoggle that could cost as much as $100 billion annually, i.e., more than 10 percent of the entire defense budget. If defense spending weren’t increased, those funds would have to come from existing programs that are far more important to the national defense. “It appears that Army programs, especially Army force levels, will be a major target for significant cuts,” Dov Zakheim, a former undersecretary of defense, warns in the Hill.
Budget cuts, damaging as they might be, are something the Pentagon has dealt with before. There has never been anything like the purge of generals that Trump has just undertaken. Vice President JD Vance is, of course, right that presidents have fired generals before. He cited the examples of Harry S. Truman firing Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Barack Obama firing Gen. Stanley McChrystal. But such firings have been exceedingly rare, and they were always for an obvious cause: MacArthur for challenging Truman’s strategy in the Korean War and McChrystal for allowing his staff to make disparaging comments about Obama and Vice President Joe Biden to a reporter.
Trump and Hegseth have not specified what it is that Brown and Franchetti have done to justify their firings beyond vague complaints alleging their prioritization of DEI. Most notably, during the protests over the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Brown made a video about the discrimination he had faced during his own rise to the top of the military.
But he is a well-respected, well-qualified commander who has always made clear that his priority is mission accomplishment, not diversity for its own sake. Given the distinguished records compiled by both Brown and Franchetti, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they were let go simply because one is a racial minority and the other a woman.
In his 2024 book, Hegseth insinuated that Brown was promoted because of his race: “Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt — which on its face seems unfair to CQ. But since he has made the race card one of his biggest calling cards, it doesn’t really much matter,” Hegseth wrote.
That’s a gross calumny of a general who has logged more than 3,100 hours of flight time in an F-16 (including 130 combat hours) and previously served as deputy commander of Central Command, commander of Pacific Air Forces and chief of staff of the Air Force. (He was appointed to the latter post by none other than Trump.) The suggestion that Brown was chosen for reasons other than merit is pretty rich coming from the least qualified defense secretary since that post was established in 1947.
Hegseth’s aspersions on Brown and other distinguished officers are all the more galling given who has been nominated to replace Brown as Joint Chiefs chairman: Retired Lt. Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine would need a waiver from the president because he doesn’t fulfill the statutory qualifications for the post. The law requires that anyone serving as chairman have been either vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a service chief, or the commander of a combat command. Caine’s highest-ranking military assignment was as deputy commander of a Special Operations task force fighting the Islamic State in Iraq.
He seems to have been chosen because he made such a big impression on Trump during one meeting in Iraq in 2018. Trump has often claimed that Caine told him that the Islamic State could be defeated faster than others had suggested and then, vowing to kill for Trump, proceeded to don a “Make America Great Again” hat. If so, this would have been done in defiance of rules against military personnel wearing political paraphernalia while in uniform. But the New York Times reports that Caine has denied wearing a MAGA hat, and The Post reports that John Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser and accompanied him to Iraq, never heard Caine say or do what Trump claims. Officers who know Caine say he is apolitical.
It is quite possible — likely, even — that Trump will be as disenchanted with Caine as he was with generals he previously appointed, such as Mark A. Milley as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or, for that matter, Brown. But the fact that Caine might have been chosen for political reasons — even if those reasons aren’t based in fact — nevertheless sends a troubling message to the armed forces. So, too, does the firing of the judge advocates general, who are charged with enforcing compliance with the nation’s laws and the laws of war. Taken together, these moves suggest that Trump and Hegseth are trying to manipulate the armed forces for political ends while planning to ignore the rule of law. If so, that would endanger the values that have made the American military great.
“Political interference in military leadership — especially dismissing generals and admirals based on ideological loyalty rather than competence — has repeatedly led to disastrous consequences,” retired Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling warned in the Bulwark on Friday. “Whether driven by paranoia, sectarianism, or a desire for greater personal control, politically motivated purges have a history of weakening armies, undermining national security, and, in the worst cases, leading to battlefield defeat.”