Daniel Davis: Hegseth Should Have Fired More Officers
New episode out now
At the end February, newly minted Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General CQ Brown, who was an appointee of President Biden and had been on the job 15 months. Hegseth said Brown, a career Air Force officer, was “honorable” but “not the right man for the moment,” and said the replacements of five other three- and four-stars were “a reflection of the president wanting the right people around him to execute the national security approach we want to take.”
Among the myriad criticisms about these firings is that Trump is not replacing these posts with the most qualified officers, but loyalists. This seems to be the complaint about Trump's choice last week to nominate Lt. Gen. Dan "Razin" Caine to replace Brown as his pick to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which writers at Military.com called “uncharted territory for the military.”
They say Caine, a retired three-star Air Force general, does not meet the legal requirements to serve as the chairman because he never served as the vice chairman, the head of a service branch, or the commander of a unified or specified combatant command. His most recent assignment before retiring in 2024 was the Director of Special Programs and the Department of Defense Special Access Program Central Office at the Pentagon.
The other complaint is that Trump and Hegseth have been vocal and active about dismantling the diversity and inclusion programs in the military and that Brown had been cited for engaging a quota system in the officer application pool (the military refers to them as goals) when he was Air Force Chief of Staff in 2022. Trump’s advisors have also cited a video Brown made in the wake of the George Floyd death and ensuing protests as politicization, and what blew up his relations with Brown as well as then-chairman Mark Milley.
Hegseth is also being criticized for firing all of the judge advocate generals, also known as JAGs, the top military lawyers. Some say he wants pliancy rather than experts who can keep the military acting within the rule of the law. One of Hegseth’s big assertions is that the U.S. lost the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq because their hands were tied due to overly stringent rules of engagement. On Friday, it was announced that he will be repealing restrictions on U.S. airstrikes, broadening the range of people who can be targeted in attacks and no longer solely focusing on striking senior leadership of terrorist organizations, as permitted under the Biden and Obama administrations.
This is a lot to unpack, as on one hand there have been complaints for years that the military brass is too top heavy, that the promotional system is broken and corruptible, and that it does not reward strategic competence and critical thinking. Rather, those who can maneuver up the food chain with political skill and high deference to doctrine and maintaining the static quo are the only ones who make it to the top.
But what do we make of Hegseth’s moves here? Is he recognizing the real problem or is he firing these officers for completely different reasons, or a little of both?
So we brought in friend of the show (Ret.) Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, military analyst for Defense Priorities and host of the Deep Dive podcast, to break it all down for us.
More from Danny Davis:
February 21, 2025
Ukraine’s NATO Fantasy Sparked a Nightmare War with Russia