NYT (“Hegseth Strikes Female and Black Navy Officers From Promotion List“):
In a move that disproportionately targets women and minority officers, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently blocked the promotions of nine Navy officers who had been selected by a board of senior Navy admirals.
The net result of Mr. Hegseth’s intervention is a slate of 22 nominees to be one-star admirals that bears little resemblance to the broader force these officers will help lead.
Three of the officers removed by Mr. Hegseth from the promotion list are women and two are Black men. An additional four are white men.
Mr. Hegseth’s actions, which appear to violate the rules governing a promotion system that is supposed to be apolitical and merit-based, were described by five current and former defense officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.
No female officers were included on the new one-star list, which was released publicly in late May, despite the fact that women make up about 21 percent of the active-duty Navy. The list appears to include only two nonwhite officers, even though sailors who identify as racial minorities make up about 38 percent of the active-duty Navy.
Mr. Hegseth’s removal of the officers from the one-star list is highly unusual, said the current and former defense officials. According to Pentagon rules, the defense secretary is supposed to pull officers from the list only for moral, mental, physical or professional failings that raise questions about the officers’ fitness to lead.
Given how many women and minority officers have been fired under this administration, there’s good reason to focus on the demographics here. By both word and deed, Hegseth in particular has made it clear that he believes that, if a woman or minority officer is in a billet or promotion list, the presumption should be that they got there through preferential treatment. Woke DEI and all that.
That said, the service’s overall demographic profile is not the right lens through which to judge this. While 38 percent of Navy personnel are from racial or ethnic minorities and 21 percent are women (with some overlap in those groups, obviously), those numbers are much smaller for the officer corps and, in particular, the flag officer ranks. As of 2020, the most recent data I could find, 3.3 percent of Navy flag officers (8 of 240) are Black, and 10 percent (23 of 240) are women. The Navy officer corps as a whole was 7.5 percent black and 18 percent female. To the extent this is problematic, it predates the Trump administration. (See here and here, for example.)
Further, unless the four white men removed from the list were simply sacrificed to cover for the removal of the women and minority selectees, there’s presumably something else going on here. My instinct is that there is vetting for signs of partisan sympathy, DEI proclivity, or other related ideological conflicts. And, alas, Black and female selectees are likely viewed with the presumption that they’re on the wrong side of the woke divide.
That the Secretary’s intervening in the promotion process for partisan or ideological reasons violates longstanding Department policy isn’t, per se, problematic. The Secretary gets to set Department policy, after all. What is problematic, however, is that vetting general and flag officers on partisan grounds sets a dangerous precedent. In the first Trump administration, he frustrated civil-military relations scholars with his constant references to “my generals.” In the second administration, those who remain in their posts are, by definition, his generals and admirals. The next Democratic administration will almost certainly see the officer corps as tainted and act accordingly.
