In a historic and unprecedented move, the Trump administration on Friday night fired the Joint Chiefs chairman, the Navy's top officer, the Air Force vice chief of staff, and the judge advocates general of three service branches.
President Donald Trump, in a social media post, announced the firing of Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Charles "CQ" Brown and nominated currently retired and little known Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan "Razin" Caine to take the post.
Then, minutes later, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that he had fired the Navy's top officer -- Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to hold the post -- as well as the Air Force's second-highest officer, Gen. James Slife. Hegseth said he was also removing the judge advocates general of the Army, Navy and Air Force, who oversee the military justice system.
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The culling of top military leadership came on the same day the Pentagon announced it will fire 5,400 civilian employees next week as the first step in reducing Defense Department staffing by 5% to 8%. It said the move would be followed by a hiring freeze.
Taken together, the firing of at least six top military leaders is a historic, though legal, gutting of military ranks by civilian leadership. Several of the names -- especially Brown and Franchetti -- had become targets of Hegseth and other figures in conservative circles who argued, without evidence, that they had gotten the job to fill a diversity quota rather than on merit.
Neither Trump nor Hegseth offered any explanation as to why any of the officers were being fired and did not provide any details about the exact nature of their removal.
Trump and billionaire Elon Musk have fired thousands of federal employees in recent weeks from agencies including the Department of Veterans Affairs, often with few details. The gutting of the federal workforce has caused increasing outcry and frustration in Washington, D.C., and across the country.
In Brown's place, Trump made the highly unusual move of nominating a currently retired three-star Air Force general whom he said was an "accomplished pilot, national security expert, successful entrepreneur, and a 'warfighter' with significant interagency and special operations experience."
While legally and traditionally, the chairman has to be either the serving vice chairman, one of the service secretaries, or a combatant commander, the law also allows the commander in chief to waive the requirement "if the president determines such action is necessary in the national interest."
It's not clear whether Caine will take on the job as a civilian or return to military service.
Hegseth also made the unusual move of not announcing replacements for Franchetti, Slife or the top lawyers of the Army, Navy and Air Force. Instead, he said he was "requesting nominations" for the posts.
Brown, who notably stepped into his prior role as the Air Force's top uniformed leader under Trump's first administration and was confirmed by the Senate, was long identified as a prime target of the firings under the new Pentagon leadership and ideology.
He was confirmed by the Senate as Joint Chiefs chairman in September 2023.
"First of all, you've got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs," Hegseth, prior to his confirmation as defense secretary, said on a podcast in November.
"Any general that was involved, any general, admiral, whatever, that was involved in any of the [diversity, equity and inclusion] woke sh-- has got to go."
However, weeks later, on his first day of work at the Pentagon, Hegseth was asked directly whether he wanted to fire Brown as the general stood beside him.
"I'm standing with him right now. Look forward to working with him," Hegseth said at the time, seemingly offering a mild endorsement of Brown -- who is Black -- to the president.
In an emotional June 2020 video, just prior to becoming Air Force chief of staff, Brown said in the wake of George Floyd's death at the hands of police that he was "thinking about a history of racial issues and my own experiences that didn't always sing of liberty and equality" and added he would "lead, participate in, and listen to necessary conversations on racism, diversity and inclusion."
In August 2022, Brown signed an Air Force memo that established historic diversity goals for officer applicants, saying it was "imperative that the composition of our military services better reflect our nation's highly talented, diverse and eligible population."
Ultimately, those goals were never fully reached in the two years they were set, Military.com previously reported, and they were quickly scrapped this month under Hegseth's leadership.
Meanwhile, Franchetti was confirmed by the Senate as the first female military admiral to oversee the Navy -- the chief of naval operations -- in August 2023 after serving as the vice chief.
Franchetti's tenure has largely been uneventful, and she hasn't issued any dramatic policies or instituted any major changes to the Navy during her time in office that would have run afoul of the Trump administration and its focus on stripping the military of any diversity measures.
During her confirmation hearing, Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, went after a 2021 CNO reading list put together by Franchetti's predecessor, Adm. Mike Gilday, that included titles like "How to be an Antiracist" by Ibram X. Kendi.
"I don't know why there's so much focus on race," Sullivan said while asking whether Franchetti would commit to getting back to what Sullivan sees as "normal reading lists for sailors and Marines."
Franchetti demurred, telling the senator that she would "develop a process" for selecting books for her reading lists but noted that she "will focus on warfighting, warfighters and winning" -- now a popular theme with Hegseth.
In contrast, the last time Gilday was confronted by Republicans over similar allegations in April -- then focused on a brief video of a non-binary sailor who was proud of an opportunity to read a poem to her ship -- he offered a full-throated defense of the sailor and the Navy's push to be more inclusive.
"That level of trust that a commanding officer develops across that unit has to be able to be grounded on dignity and respect," Gilday said.
However, Hegseth also took aim at Franchetti in his most recent book, in which he claimed she was unqualified for the job and was chosen for the role because "politics is all about optics instead of results."
"Naval operations being weakened won't matter to anyone," he added.
Finally, Slife, who was serving as the vice chief of staff of the Air Force, has also been a target of Republican criticisms for voicing concerns about racism in the ranks.
In a since-deleted memo from May 2020, Slife -- then the head of Air Force Special Operations -- expressed concerns, like Brown did, in the wake of Floyd's death at the hands of police and encouraged airmen to be mindful.
"We'd be naive to think issues of institutional racism and unconscious bias don't affect us," the memo, viewed by Military.com on an archived webpage, reads. "We can't ignore it. We have to face it. And to face it, we have to talk about it."
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