Women in Hegseth’s Military
By 
Trump and Hegseth have been on a firing spree throughout the military, especially when it comes to removing women from senior positions. This past winter, the administration fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first female chief of naval operations; Admiral Linda Fagan, the first female Coast Guard commandant; and Lieutenant General Jennifer Short, who was serving as the senior military assistant to the secretary of defense, all within weeks of one another. I taught for many years at the U.S. Naval War College, where I worked under its first female president, Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield. In 2023, she became the U.S. military representative to the NATO Military Committee—and then she was fired in April, apparently in part because of a presentation she gave on Women’s Equality Day 10 years ago.
At this point, women have been cleared out of all of the military’s top jobs. They are not likely to be replaced by other women: Of the three dozen four-star officers on active duty in the U.S. armed forces, none is female, and none of the administration’s pending appointments for senior jobs even at the three-star level is a woman.
Some observers might see a pattern here.
Discerning this pattern does not exactly require Columbo-level sleuthing. Hegseth’s antipathy toward women in the armed forces was well documented back in 2024 by none other than Hegseth himself. In his book The War on Warriors, Hegseth decried what he believed was “social engineering” by the American left: “While the American people had always rejected the radical-feminist so-called ‘Equal Rights Amendment,’ Team Obama could fast-track their social engineering through the military’s top-down chain of command.” (This is probably why Hegseth also fired the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General C. Q. Brown, who is a Black man; Brown was let go for ostensibly being too interested in promoting diversity in the armed forces.)
For generations right-wingers have been decrying the “social engineering” mentioned above, arguing that using recruitment and training policies in the nation’s single largest institution to effect social goals detracted from effectiveness and “lethality.”* But over time changes in the character of war have resulted in a world where “lethality” is less dependent upon large biceps and reckless courage than it is on careful planning, well thought-out coordination of different elements of power, and effective management of personnel. An effective military organization in the 21st century looks much more like a well-run corporation than a Spartan phalanx. And it turns out that right wingers… didn’t want an effective and lethal military so much as they wanted to effect their own social goals through management of the nation’s single largest institution.
Thus, Pete Hegseth. And women and minorities are sideline while trans-Americans are tossed to the curb.
*”Lethality” in modern military-speak is kind of just a synonym for “good,” rather than an aspiration to kill people. To illustrate I have written a short play:
- Colonel: “Is this coffee lethal?
- Captain: “Yes, sir.”
- Colonel: “Oh well then I’ll have a cup.”
- Captain: “Cream and sugar?”
Photo credit: By U.S. Navy – https://www.navy.mil/Leadership/Flag-Officer-Biographies/BioDisplay/Article/3148210/admiral-lisa-franchetti/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=146184751