By admin 
It’s been clear from his first days as secretary of defense that Pete Hegseth sees little place in the military’s senior officer corps for Black people and women. Recently, he’s only stiffened that impression.
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In recent weeks, he blocked the promotion of eight Navy captains to the rank of admiral, three of whom were women, two of whom were Black. Of the 22 Navy officers promoted to admiral since Hegseth took the Pentagon’s helm, none have been women.
Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, condemned Hegseth’s actions, accusing him of “hollowing out the military’s bench of experienced and highest-performing senior officers while making young officers”—especially Black and female officers—“wonder if they should continue to serve.”
Hegseth’s recent actions fit a pattern. Among his first actions after the Senate just barely confirmed him, thanks to a tiebreaking vote by Vice President J.D. Vance, Hegseth fired the Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown, and the Navy’s first-ever female top officer, Adm. Lisa Franchetti—neither for any cause related to merit.
As a former Fox News host and retired Army major, Hegseth had loudly bemoaned the rise of “woke” politics and what he saw as affirmative-action promotions within the military. In one of his books, he raised questions about Brown’s promotion to chairman under President Joe Biden. “Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill?” Hegseth asked. “We’ll never know, but always doubt.”
It’s one thing to oppose affirmative action, but Hegseth seems to follow a policy of negative action. He assumes that just because top-ranking officers are Black or women, they got their job because of some quota.
Hegseth did not mention, either when he wrote his book or when he later fired him, that Gen. Brown, an F-16 pilot, had racked up 3,000 flight hours, 130 of them in combat, or that he’d served as commander of U.S. Air Forces in the Pacific and the Middle East, rising to deputy commander of U.S. Central Command—or that he’d been named Air Force chief of staff in March 2020, to no objection from the president at the time, Donald Trump.
As for Adm. Franchetti, Hegseth saw no need to note that, before being named chief of naval operations, she had been the Joint Staff’s director for strategy, plans, and policy, and, before then, deputy chief of naval operations for warfighting development, or before that, commander of the U.S. 6th Fleet and commander of various aircraft carrier strike groups.
It is extremely doubtful that the Air Force or the Navy would fill such vital and difficult command slots on the basis of some racial or gender quotas. In any case, there were no reports that Brown, Franchetti, or any of the nearly three dozen officers that Hegseth has fired or blocked were performing below standards at their jobs.
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Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell denied reports of discrimination in military promotion policies, saying, “Under President Trump and Secretary Hegseth, meritocracy reigns supreme at the War Department”—which is sort of hilarious, given that Hegseth is the least qualified secretary of defense in the job’s 79-year history.
Are Hegseth’s firings and blockings legal? It seems so. Federal statutes require the secretary of defense, or secretary of one of the services, to jump through various hoops in order to delay the promotion of an officer. But the statute on removing an officer states: “The president may remove the name of any officer from a promotion list at any time before the date on which the officer is promoted.” And an delegated this authority to the secretary of defense.
But are Hegseth’s actions common? Not at all. I consulted a few military lawyers and defense historians on the question, and none of them could think of any case where a secretary of defense has blocked an officer’s promotion—much less eight officers from a single promotion board’s list, much less three dozen officers over a period of a year. (These authorities asked not to be identified, because they weren’t sure that this had never happened.)
I can think of one case where a senior civilian in the Pentagon manipulated the promotion process to make sure that certain colonels were lifted to the rank of general. It happened in 2007, the peak year of violence in the Iraq War. The new secretary of the Army, Pete Geren, was handed a list of the Army generals who would serve on that year’s panel to select which colonels would be promoted to one-star general. Geren had come under the influence of some midgrade officers, notably Col. John Nagl, who strongly felt that the Army’s top brass were too hidebound to the old ways of warfighting—large-scale tank-and-infantry battles—and were blocking the promotions of officers who were fighting counterinsurgency battles in the field. Geren thought that the generals on the list would keep blocking the creative colonels. So he tore up the list and drew up his own. It included Gen. David Petraeus and others of like mind who would probably promote officers skilled at fighting the new kind of war. Petraeus was commander of U.S. forces in Iraq; Geren had to get the permission of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to bring home an active war commander; Gates liked the idea and signed off. Otherwise, Gates told me a few years later, when I was writing my book The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War, that he otherwise had nothing to do with this.
It was a fluke, but it led to the promotion of H.R. McMaster and several other creative colonels, who, at least for a little while, turned around both the Iraq War and the upper echelons of the U.S. Army.
Warfare is going through another transition, one placing new, if not central, emphasis on drones, networks, and A.I. If Hegseth were disrupting the promotion process in order to displace the old guard and accelerate the rise of officers well versed in this new phase of warfare, that would be one thing.
But that’s not what Hegseth is doing. He’s firing and blocking perfectly competent, even much-celebrated officers in order to defeat the influence of “woke”—which has nothing to do with the requirements of warfighting or measures of (to invoke another of his favorite words) “lethality.”
Like his master in the White House, Hegseth values loyalty above all else. While scratching out the names of officers that the official board had approved for promotion, Hegseth advanced a candidate of his own—a Navy SEAL captain named William Francis Jr. The promotion board had twice turned down Francis’ application because he doesn’t have experience as a commander. But Hegseth doesn’t care about that. Francis is Hegseth’s military assistant—and that’s his key credential as far as the self-named “secretary of war” is concerned. He wants a “Hegseth man” in the upper echelons of the military—even if Hegseth couldn’t manage to rise higher than three ranks below the status of one-star general himself.
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