Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth removed nine Navy officers, including every woman and several Black service members, from a list of nominees to become one-star admirals, leaving an all-male, overwhelmingly white slate of 22 names, The Guardian reported. The move, which a person familiar with the matter described to the newspaper, marks the latest in a series of aggressive personnel actions that have made Hegseth one of the most controversial Pentagon chiefs in recent memory.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that Hegseth's intervention violated promotion rules designed to be merit-based and apolitical. A board of Navy admirals had drawn up the original list. Hegseth overruled them.
The resulting slate, published May 22 on the War Department's website, still requires confirmation by the U.S. Senate. But the composition of the list, and the pattern it extends, has already become a flashpoint in the broader debate over how the military selects its leaders.
Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell pushed back firmly on the suggestion that race or sex drove the removals:
"As we've said before, military promotions are given to those who have earned them. The department will never consider the color of a service member's skin or their gender as a factor in promotions."
Parnell added that "under President Trump and Secretary Hegseth, meritocracy reigns supreme at the war department."
That framing fits the administration's broader argument: that Biden-era diversity mandates warped the promotion process and that restoring merit means ignoring demographic categories altogether. Hegseth himself said as much at a keynote meeting of military commanders in Virginia in September.
"For too long, we've promoted too many uniform leaders for the wrong reasons, based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts."
He followed that with a line that reads as mission statement: "The sooner we have the right people, the sooner we can advance the right policies."
The original Navy list reportedly included three women and two Black officers beyond the two who remained on the final slate. Hegseth also removed four white officers, a detail that complicates any simple racial narrative. But the end result, zero women among 22 nominees, is hard to square with a Navy whose active-duty ranks are more than 21 percent female and nearly 40 percent minority, per a 2024 government demographics profile.
The Navy list is not an isolated episode. The New York Times reported that Hegseth has fired or sidelined nearly three dozen senior military officers overall. The Guardian reported in March that shortly after his confirmation, Hegseth blocked promotions or redeployed senior officers, 60 percent of them women or Black.
In March, Hegseth reportedly directed Army Secretary Dan Driscoll to remove two women and two Black officers from a separate nomination slate for one-star generals. That intervention followed the same template: a civilian political appointee overriding a military board's recommendations.
The personnel shake-ups have not been limited to promotion lists. Hegseth reassigned Vice Adm. Yvette Davids, the first woman to lead the U.S. Naval Academy. He dismissed Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield from her post as the U.S. military representative to the NATO military committee. And he removed Adm. Lisa Franchetti as chief of naval operations.
Even before Hegseth took office, the tone was set. Coast Guard Commandant Linda Fagan, a 37-year veteran and the longest-serving active-duty marine safety officer, was dismissed on January 20, 2025, the first day of Trump's second term. That came four days before Hegseth's Senate confirmation.
The scope of these removals has drawn criticism not just from Democrats but from within Republican ranks. Sen. Thom Tillis has publicly questioned Hegseth's judgment, and his pointed remarks about the forced exits of top generals signaled real discomfort on the right.
The conservative case for what Hegseth is doing is straightforward and, on its face, reasonable. The military's job is to fight and win wars. If the previous administration allowed identity politics to creep into promotion boards, correcting that is not just defensible, it's necessary. No one should get a star on their shoulder because of a demographic checkbox.
But the conservative case for civilian restraint in military promotions is also strong. The board system exists precisely to insulate career advancement from political interference. When a defense secretary personally scrubs names from a list assembled by admirals who know the candidates' service records, the question shifts. It is no longer about whether DEI distorted the process. It becomes whether one form of political interference has simply replaced another.
A government source familiar with the matter told The Guardian that Hegseth had "his favorite MOS's [military occupational specialties], and then gender and race" as factors. The Pentagon flatly denied that characterization. Without seeing the internal deliberations, readers cannot resolve the dispute. But the pattern, every woman removed, every time, invites the question.
One name that did survive the cut raises its own questions. Capt. Sean Barbabella, Donald Trump's White House physician, remains on the May 22 Navy list. Barbabella last week declared the president to be in "excellent health." His inclusion on a flag-officer promotion slate, whatever his qualifications, does not exactly quiet concerns about political favoritism in the process.
Hegseth's broader management decisions have also fueled skepticism. His abrupt cancellation of a 4,000-troop deployment to Poland reportedly caught Pentagon officials and allied governments off guard. That kind of move, combined with the personnel purges, has created a picture of a Pentagon chief operating on instinct and ideology rather than institutional process.
The promotion controversy lands at a moment when Hegseth is already facing pressure from multiple directions. A House Democrat has filed impeachment articles against him, and while that effort has little chance of succeeding in a Republican-controlled chamber, it reflects the intensity of opposition to his tenure.
More consequential is the growing unease among Republicans. Tillis's comparison of Hegseth's performance to that of other Trump nominees was not subtle. His remark that Hegseth's missteps make other cabinet picks look like "five-star recruits" by comparison was the kind of public rebuke that signals real trouble within the governing coalition.
Meanwhile, a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., ruled Monday that the government acted illegally by moving to dismiss transgender service members, another front in the administration's military personnel battles and another indication that the courts may not rubber-stamp every decision coming out of the Pentagon.
Hegseth's firing of the Army chief of staff over suspicion of leaking, as previously reported, added yet another layer to the perception that loyalty to the secretary matters more than anything else in today's Pentagon.
The Senate will ultimately decide whether these 22 nominees become admirals. That confirmation process is where the facts about each officer's record, combat deployments, command evaluations, professional qualifications, should be laid bare. If the 22 survivors are genuinely the most qualified candidates, the administration's case makes itself. If they are not, no amount of rhetoric about meritocracy will cover the gap.
Conservatives rightly objected when the Biden administration treated the military as a laboratory for social policy. Diversity training that displaced combat readiness, promotion criteria that weighed identity over competence, a recruiting crisis driven partly by cultural messaging that alienated the military's traditional base, all of that demanded correction.
But correction is not the same as inversion. Stripping every woman from a promotion list while keeping the president's personal physician on it does not look like meritocracy. It looks like a different kind of quota, one that simply flips the categories.
The military earns public trust by promoting warriors, not by settling political scores. If Hegseth wants to prove that merit drives his decisions, the evidence needs to be in the records of the officers he kept, not just in the talking points of his spokesman.
A Pentagon that replaces one set of political preferences with another has not restored meritocracy. It has just changed who gets to put a thumb on the scale.
