Who Moves Up, and Who's Pushed Out, in Pete Hegseth's Military

The Daily - The New York Times

This episode of The Daily explores Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's sweeping overhaul of the U.S. military's senior leadership, focusing on his dismissal and promotion

Key takeaways

• Hegseth's purge of senior officers—over 65 to 70 generals and admirals blocked or fired—targets those linked to DEI programs, signaling a shift from meritocracy to ideological loyalty.
• Admiral Lisa Franchetti's career exemplifies progress for women in the military, rising from being barred from combat ships to commanding major naval forces, yet was denied top leadership due to political and ideological factors.

Main topics

• Pete Hegseth's leadership overhaul of the U.S. military
• The impact of DEI policies on military promotions and appointments

Notable quotes

"We are clearing out the debris. You might say we're ending the war on warriors." – Pete Hegseth

Conclusion

Hegseth's transformation of the military leadership reflects a broader ideological shift that prioritizes loyalty over merit and

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) I'm David Marchese. And I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro. And we're the hosts of The Interview from The New York Times. David and I have spent our careers interviewing some of the most interesting and influential people in the world. Which means we know when to ask tough questions and when to just sit back and listen. And now we've teamed up to have these conversations every week. We'll try to reveal something about the people shaping our world. And we'll get some great stories from them, too. It's The Interview from The New York Times. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 7 (0:32) From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Speaker 7 (0:44) For the past 18 months, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has remade the top ranks of the U.S. military, dismissing or sidelining many whose rise, he believes, was aided by DEI, and replacing them with officers who fit his definition of merit. In the process, many argue, Hegseth is prioritizing loyalty to him and his ideas over loyalty to the military itself. Speaker 7 (1:16) Today, my colleague Greg Jaffe takes us inside the hiring and firing for a single job that's become a case study for Hegseth's approach. Speaker 7 (1:30) It's Thursday, August 20th. Speaker 1 (1:37) Greg, welcome to The Daily. I know this is your first time on the show, so glad to have you. Speaker 2 (1:41) Yeah, thanks for having me. Speaker 1 (1:42) Pleasure is all mine. Speaker 2 (1:43) So Speaker 1 (1:44) I think it's fair to say that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's desire to transform the senior ranks of the U.S. military is pretty well established by now. So why did you decide to pursue this story? Speaker 2 (1:59) So we knew that when Secretary Hegseth came in, and even before he came in, he talked about wanting to remove senior military officers, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And then in September of last year, Good morning and Speaker 8 (2:14) welcome to the War Department. Speaker 2 (2:16) He gives a big speech in which he again talks about the need to clean house, to remove people who he thinks have been inserted into the military by ideologues and have been manipulated into pursuing like diversity, equity and inclusion programs. No Speaker 8 (2:32) more identity months. DEI offices. Speaker 2 (2:36) And so it's Speaker 8 (2:37) a Speaker 2 (2:37) really broad campaign to sort of reclaim a military that he thinks has been taken over by leftist forces. And I think he blames, in some cases, the losses in Iraq and Afghanistan on the sort of the corruption of the officer corps of the United States military. And so he's going to fix that problem. Speaker 8 (2:55) We are clearing out the debris. You might say we're ending the war on warriors. Speaker 2 (3:02) And some of that happens in 2025. Within his first month, he fires a large number of people. The Speaker 4 (3:09) Air Force Vice Chief of Staff were all fired Friday night. And no specific explanations were given. Speaker 2 (3:14) It's a pretty significant purge of some of the top ranks of the military. Speaker 6 (3:18) Right. We did a whole episode about C.Q. Brown, for example, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was fired in this first wave. Speaker 2 (3:26) Yep. But I think we really start to see it in 2026, where the firings are continuing. Speaker 4 (3:32) Hegseth has fired more than a dozen generals and admirals since he took over as secretary. And Speaker 2 (3:38) he's blocking large numbers of people, women and people of color, from getting promotions that they had earned at senior levels. And so Kate Kelly and I, who had been working on this, we'd found upwards of 65 to 70 people who had been either fired. or blocked from promotions that they had earned. And that's about 10 % of the entire general officer corps, which is, you know, admirals and generals. Huge. Yep, yep. But in reality, it's probably higher. Speaker 6 (4:08) So this is about as wide-ranging a house cleaning as one can imagine. Speaker 2 (4:14) Yeah, I've been covering the military since 1999 off and on, and I cannot think of anything remotely close to this in the last 26 years. And given all that, we wanted to understand both what it took to fall out of favor with Secretary Hegseth, but also to understand what it took to get hired in this Pentagon. And that's what led us to the story of Lisa Franchetti and Daryl Caudill, hoping it would help us understand in a broad sense how Secretary Hegseth was really changing the military in ways that were really transformative. Speaker 1 (4:49) So let's start with what you found about Lisa Franchetti. the member of that Speaker 6 (4:54) duo who was fired by Hegseth. What did you find out about her? Speaker 2 (5:01) So Admiral Franchetti has told her story in lots of interviews about how she grew up in Rochester, New York, and she went to Northwestern University, which is not the normal path necessarily for naval officers. I was Speaker 5 (5:12) 17. I was going to Medill, the most amazing journalism school in the country, and I was going to be a reporter. Speaker 2 (5:19) She was a coxswain on the rowing team, and so her job was to command the men rowing their boat. Speaker 5 (5:25) Oh, my gosh. So I learned a lot about leadership. You know, you have all these incredibly powerful individual athletes, but you need to get them to become part of the team. Speaker 2 (5:36) You know, I think that was about the extent of her naval experience prior to that. Speaker 5 (5:40) But what happened is I was... But one Speaker 2 (5:42) day she met a group of guys on campus who had decided to join the Navy to help pay for school. Speaker 5 (5:46) And I said, really? Tell me more. And they talked about free textbooks, a chance to see the world. Speaker 2 (5:52) And a recruiter sold her on the adventure of the armed forces. Speaker 5 (5:55) And he told me all kinds of amazing stories, sea stories as I now know them, about the Navy. And I signed up on the spot. Wow. That's a Speaker 2 (6:04) story of actually a lot of people who joined the service who don't have an intimate familiarity with it, but are looking for some way to get ahead in their life, some benefit, and some sense of adventure. Speaker 5 (6:14) But I stayed for the mission. Yeah. And just a chance to serve something greater than myself. Speaker 1 (6:20) And Speaker 6 (6:21) what is her experience once she joins the Navy? Speaker 2 (6:26) When she joins, it's the 1980s. And so there's still at that point something called the Combat Exclusion Ban that's in place. And that prevents women from serving on combat ships or serving in combat aircraft. and really limits the opportunity of women to ascend to high ranks in the service. Speaker 1 (6:45) Wow. So when she arrives at the Navy, women, they Speaker 6 (6:49) can't even be on the ships that we most identify with the Navy itself, which to me sounds a little bit like being drafted to play professional basketball and being told that Speaker 1 (7:00) you can never go on the court. It's a pretty big deal. Speaker 2 (7:02) Yeah. And there's an interesting moment. So I think in 1989, she's one of 184. female surface warfare officers in the entire United States Navy. And one of those officers was chosen to command an auxiliary logistics ship. So this is a... Not a combat Speaker 6 (7:19) ship. Speaker 2 (7:20) Right, exactly. And it's such a big event that the chief of naval operations, the job that Franchetti will someday hold, writes a letter to all 184 female officers saying, I look forward to the day soon when this will cease to be a special event. Speaker 1 (7:36) And Speaker 2 (7:36) so... She's at a moment where things are just beginning