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Hegseth is Being Confronted by his Worst Nightmare, Too
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Day by day, Hegseth’s nightmare is getting closer to home
I want to follow up on Marcy’s great post on Secretary of Excursions Pete Hegseth’s attempts to deflect and deny responsibility by firing senior people at the DOD. He has gotten a lot of press over his ouster of women and minority generals, admirals, and commanders of various kind, all out of his desire to ride the DOD of wokeness and to purge those who received promotions not on merit but because of diversity quotas. (Note, please, that by Whiskey Pete’s lights, any woman or black who was promoted to a senior position was by definition a diversity hire, not a merit-based promotion.)
But there’s the other side of Hegseth’s problems in the military — promotions — and he’s got problems galore in that respect as well. These problems didn’t start with Hegseth, though. it was part of Trump’s first administration, too. From Helene Cooper in March 2021 (shortly after Joe Biden took office):
The Marine Corps is promoting Col. Anthony Henderson, a combat-tested Iraq and Afghanistan veteran, to brigadier general, a move that cracks the doorway for the service to potentially promote an African-American to its most senior ranks.
The Marine Corps, which had passed over Colonel Henderson for four years, has placed him on a highly selective list of nine colonels to be granted a coveted one star that denotes general rank status — brigadier general. The list, which was signed by President Biden, arrived Wednesday evening at the Senate Armed Services Committee, to start the required confirmation process, according to the committee’s website.
While earlier promotion boards may have passed Henderson over because he didn’t have the same relationships and mentors that other white candidates had, the last board clearly wanted to promote him but were pretty sure that he’d get his name struck off the list by Trump. Thus, they delayed sending up the list until Biden took office. Cooper wrote about Col. Henderson the previous August, shortly before the promotions board met to consider his promotion for the fourth time, and some quoted in the March article attributed to his eventual appearance on the promotions list that Biden signed.
But as bad as the story of Henderson’s promotion is, it also points to an even larger, more systemic problem for Hegseth. In the past two months, Greg Jaffe and Kate Kelly at the NYT have published two major pieces on the promotion practices under Pete Hegseth. The titles alone are instructive:
Secret Vetting and Blocked Promotions: Inside Hegseth’s War on Diversity
A Black admiral fixed one of the Navy’s worst messes. Mr. Hegseth blocked his promotion anyway. [June 19, 2026]An Admiral’s Rise Reveals the Politics Driving Hegseth’s Pentagon
Before he was picked to lead the Navy, Adm. Daryl Caudle found ways to signal his support for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s anti-diversity goals. [July 26, 2026]Buried deep in that first piece is a nugget that points to Hegseth’s biggest problem of all.
By law, one-star and two-star officers are chosen by promotion selection boards made up of senior military officers. The meetings are so confidential that board members are not permitted to tell others that they are part of the process.
And yet, these officers and others like them are starting to talk. That ought to scare the pants off Hegseth, but I don’t think he realized how bad that problem is.
From that second story:
Adm. Daryl Caudle saw an opening to land the Navy’s top job last year, and he seized it.
Before Pete Hegseth had even been sworn in as defense secretary, Admiral Caudle, then the head of a major Navy training command, offered to help Mr. Hegseth prepare for his politically contentious Senate confirmation hearing, according to current and former defense officials.
The outreach was a breach of military ethics, the officials said. Senior military officers are supposed to avoid any hint of partisan bias or political activity.
Nothing came of the offer. But soon after Mr. Hegseth took office, he fired the first woman to lead the Navy: Admiral Caudle’s boss. Days later, a senior officer on Admiral Caudle’s staff contacted Mr. Hegseth’s team in another breach of protocol.
His pitch: Mr. Hegseth should choose Admiral Caudle to be the next chief of naval operations, the current and former officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.
The officer described Admiral Caudle in terms that matched Mr. Hegseth’s view of the values that military officers should embody. There was “no one more in line” with Mr. Hegseth’s vision for remaking the military, he said, according to an official familiar with the exchange. The officer cast Admiral Caudle as a “warfighter” who wanted to remove “woke barriers” that he claimed were weakening the force, the official said.
Even though Admiral Caudle was not on a list of candidates recommended by senior Navy officials, Mr. Hegseth chose him for the job.
Caudle was willing to speak out of turn in order to get this new position, but did you notice the other folks speaking out? Those “current and former officials” – either people who had been on the promotion board, their close staff members, or close friends of the promotion board members.
That’s the real problem for Hegseth. It’s not the NYT reporters that are the problem, but the folks who seem anxious to tell their stories to the media in the first place. Skipping ahead, Jaffe and Kelly wrote:
[Caudle’s] path to that position is a case study in how the military promotion process at the Pentagon under Mr. Hegseth has deviated from tradition, leaving it susceptible in the view of critics to politicization and favoritism.
[snip]
After Mr. Hegseth fired Admiral Franchetti, senior Navy officials, led by the service’s acting secretary, assembled a list of the three officers they believed were best qualified to fill her position. Admiral Caudle was not on it. Navy leaders thought he was better suited to lead the U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees the country’s nuclear arsenal, the officials said.
Mr. Hegseth reviewed the Navy’s list in a meeting with senior staff members.
“Where’s Caudle?” he asked, according to officials with knowledge of the meeting.
“Officials with knowledge of the meeting” were sharing this story? That’s a small group of very senior people, and the people around them. If they are talking like this, it means only one thing: be afraid, Mr. Secretary. Be very afraid.
These folks spoke out, I strongly suspect, because Hegseth had to bring in Hegseth’s and Trump’s legal fixer, Timothy Parlatore, to take care of a hold placed because of an IG investigation about Caudle’s less-than-enlightened mindset toward woman and sexual abuse. At an awards banquet that celebrated the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response program, some of Caudle’s informal comments over and after dinner were, shall we say, concerning:
According to the sailors [who spoke with investigators], Admiral Caudle offered examples: If he strode naked through the forest, coated in honey, he should not be surprised if he were attacked by a bear, officials said. If he wore gold chains and a fancy watch on a visit to Harlem, he risked getting robbed. At least one sailor believed Admiral Caudle was blaming assault victims for provoking their attacks.
“According to the sailors” who had spoken to the IG? Be afraid, Mr. Secretary. Be very afraid.
The sailor spoke to the IG, I suspect, because it is certainly possible to see Caudle’s remarks as a problem — especially when he had no problem making them at an awards dinner dedicated to Pentagon efforts to respond to and stop sexual abuse. I certainly could see where that might be a problem – but to Hegseth, this only confirmed that Caudle is the anti-woke kind of guy he wanted.
Hegseth’s real problem is that his desire to remove and replace senior leaders who do not reflect his anti-woke, “all we need is great warriors who can bust heads” mentality has broken trust with the very military people he seeks to command. More than just broken trust, he has proven untrustworthy.
Imagine you were on a promotion board, and time and time again Hegseth strikes names off the list you and your colleagues put forward. That’s gotta suck. And the fact that you’re not even supposed to tell anyone you are even on the board means you can’t vent your frustrations about having your work tossed aside so cavalierly. That’s gotta suck even more.
Now imagine you are someone else, asked to serve in silence on the next promotion board. You’ve seen how the work of previous boards has been treated, and you have to wonder if serving on the next board is worth the hassle. “Why bother, if Hegseth is going to ignore what we propose and pick whomever he wants anyway?” On the other hand, simply being asked to serve on the promotion board is a sign that your colleagues sincerely value your ability to assess leaders, and that’s an honor that would be hard to turn down.
Then Imagine you are someone up for promotion, and you’ve seen how Hegseth has unilaterally stripped folks off the promotions lists. You’ve seen how Hegseth promoted an admiral who completely went outside the system to get his desired post. You’ve spent weeks, months, and years to put yourself in the best light for promotion, your superiors have told you how they are doing their best to put your candidacy forward for those stripes, those bars, those birds, those stars. Even so, with what you’ve seen, with what appears to be getting worse by the day, you have to wonder how fairly you will be treated.
No, you don’t have to wonder. You know. And that’s Hegseth’s problem, because it touches the whole military – every branch of the service, and every rank from top to bottom.
Then step away from the promotions mess.
Imagine you are a senior leader whose job it is to manage logistics. Military units need not just weapons, but ammunition to use in those weapons. They need people to load and fire and maintain those weapons. You need food to feed those people and toilets for them to use, as well as clothes for them to wear, beds for them to sleep in, and laundry facilities to wash the clothes and sheets. You know they need these and a 1001 other things, and its your job to get them in place.
You also know the damage done to naval facilities in the Middle East at the outset of the war, that prevented the USS Abraham Lincoln from being supplied in the usual manner and prevented the sailors from getting even a weekend of shore leave. You and your colleagues are the ones who got the urgent pleas from the USS Abraham Lincoln to find other ways to deliver at least a minimum of stuff to let them keep doing their jobs. You and your colleagues are the ones who deal with the folks on shore trying to rebuild their bases and come up with alternative delivery systems. Even if you are handling logistics in the Army and not the Navy, you know these things, because handling supply chains is your Military Occupational Specialty, too.
And then you hear Trump talk about how the deployment wasn’t this bad, and should be even longer, because who knows more about deployments that Cadet Bone Spurs. Then you hear Hegseth saying that the USS Abraham Lincoln has been given everything they need, and there’s no problem to see here.
You hear this, and it no doubt pisses you off. The commander and senior officers of the USS Abraham Lincoln hear this, and it no doubt pisses them off. But it’s the lower level folks that ought to worry Hegseth. Right now, the stories of the USS Abraham Lincoln are being driven mostly by the families back home. “Here’s what we’ve been hearing and seeing in the text messages from out loved ones.”
Those loved ones are finally coming home, and what do you think is going to happen then, Mr. Secretary?
The return of just one sailor who has come home early has already driven the story here – a sailor who tried to commit suicide. His fellow sailors saved him death after he jumped overboard, out of his apparent desperation at the absolute hopelessness of his situation. And now, someone in the Navy has decided that what’s really needed here is to Make An Example out of this sailor by filing charges that he went AWOL.
Rather than try to learn what drove him to such desperation, try to help him, and try to understand what every sailor on the Lincoln has been dealing with so that the Navy can better make sure it doesn’t happen again, the Navy wants to make this sailor the bad guy and scare every other sailor into sucking it up and doing what they are told, mental health be damned.
What’s going to happen, I wonder, when all those other sailors come home? How many stories are going to get told over beers in the local watering holes, as the sailors on the Lincoln start talking with their colleagues at the base or folks assigned to other ships in port? How many sailors are going to decide not to reenlist? How many sailors are going to want answers from the Navy, and will turn to Congressional staffers with their stories? How many will turn to the media?
Hegseth has a standard pattern of how to deal with the press. Deny what they say or write, and keep them from writing their next story. He tried to silence the mainstream media by effectively removing their reporters from the Pentagon. Now he’s fired the senior leadership of Stars and Stripes. But both of these are signs of how desperate Hegseth is. He seems to think that he can manage bad news by shooting enough messengers.
But as the promotions stories demonstrate, those messengers are coming out it greater and greater numbers. The entire military has learned the truth of the saying “trust is build over years and destroyed in days” because Pete Hegseth has done just that. Hegseth’s problem isn’t the media, but the military itself. They are increasingly tired of being scapegoated, lied to, and dismissed as unimportant. Hegseth is only starting to realize the danger he is in, but it appears to be finally sinking in, even if he doesn’t know how to deal with. And that has to scare him to death.
Because with every day that passes, the USS Abraham Lincoln is a day closer to getting home.
The post Hegseth is Being Confronted by his Worst Nightmare, Too appeared first on emptywheel.