The Daily - Who Moves Up, and Who's Pushed Out, in Pete Hegseth's Military

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

For the past 18 months, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has remade the top ranks of the U.S. military — dismissing or sidelining many whose rise he believes was aided by D.E.I. and replacing them with officers who fit his definition of merit. In the process, many argue he’s prioritizing loyalty to him and his ideas over loyalty to the military itself. Today, Greg Jaffe, a New York Times reporter who covers the Pentagon and the U.S. military, takes us inside the hiring and firing for a single job that has become a case study for Hegseth’s approach. Guest: Greg Jaffe, a reporter covering the Pentagon and the U.S. military for The New York Times. Background reading:  Before he was picked to lead the Navy, Adm. Daryl Caudle found ways to signal his support for Mr. Hegseth’s anti-diversity goals. Mr. Hegseth fired the Navy’s top officer, Adm. Lisa Franchetti, who spent roughly half of her 40-year career at sea, commanding a destroyer, two carrier strike groups and the U.S. Sixth Fleet. Photo: Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.  Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobaro. This is the Daily. For the past 18 months, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has remade the top ranks of the U.S. military, dismissing or sidelining many whose rise, he believes, was aided by DEI, and replacing them with officers who fit his definition of merit. In the process, many argue, Hegsef is prioritizing loyalty to him and his ideas over loyalty to the military itself. Today, my colleague Greg Jaffe takes us inside the hiring and firing for a single job

that's become a case study for Hegst's approach. It's Thursday, August 20th. Greg, welcome to The Daily. I know this is your first time on the show, so. So glad to have you. Yeah, thanks for having me. Pleasure is all mine. So I think it's fair to say that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's desire to transform the senior ranks of the U.S. military is pretty well established by now.

So why did you decide to pursue this story? So we knew that when Secretary Hegseth came in, and even before he came in, he talked about wanting to remove senior military officers, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And then in September of last year, Good morning and welcome to the War Department. He gives a big speech in which he again talks about the need to clean house to remove people who he thinks have been inserted into the military by ideologues and have been manipulated into pursuing, like, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. No more identity months, DEI offices.

And so it's a really broad campaign to sort of reclaim a mission, military that he thinks has been taken over by leftist forces. And I think he blames, in some cases, the losses in Iraq and Afghanistan on the sort of the corruption of the officer corps of the United States military. And so he's going to fix that problem. We are clearing out the debris. You might say we're ending the war on warriors. And some of that happens in 2025. Within his first month, he fires a large number of people. staff were all fired Friday night. And no specific explanations were given.

It's a pretty significant purge of some of the top ranks of the military. Right, we did a whole episode about CQ Brown, for example, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was fired in this first wave. Yep. But I think we really start to see it in 2026, where the firings are continuing. Hague Seth has fired more than a dozen generals and admirals since he took over his secretary. And he's blocking large numbers of people. women and people of color from getting promotions that they had earned at senior levels. And so Kate Kelly and I who have been working on this,

we'd found upwards of 65 to 70 people who had been either fired or blocked from promotions that they had earned. And that's about 10% of the entire general officer corps, which is, you know, admirals in general. Huge. Yep, yep. But in reality, it's probably higher. So this is about as wide-ranging a house cleaning as one can imagine. Yeah, I've been covering the military since 1999 off and on,

and I cannot think of anything remotely close to this in the last 26 years. And given all that, we wanted to understand both what it took to fall out of favor with Secretary Hexeth, but also to understand what it took to get hired in this Pentagon. And that's what led us to the story of Lisa Frankeld. and Darrell Caudill, hoping it would help us understand in a broad sense how Secretary Hegseth was really changing the military in ways that were really transformative. So let's start with what you found about Lisa Frankeety, the member of that duo who was fired by HECSeth.

What did you find out about her? So Admiral Franketti has told her story in lots of interviews about how she grew up in Rochester, New York, and she went to Northwestern University, which is not the normal path necessarily for naval officers. I was going to Medell, the most amazing journalism school in the country, and that was going to be a reporter. She was a coxswain on the rowing team,

and so her job was to command the men rowing their boat. Oh, my gosh. So I learned a lot about leadership. You know, you have all these incredibly powerful individual athletes, but you need to get them to become part of the team. You know, I think that was about the extent of her naval experience prior to that. But what happened is I was walking out. But one day, she met a group of guys on campus who had decided to join the Navy to help pay for school.

And I said, really, tell me more. And they talked about free textbooks, a chance to see the world. And a recruiter sold her on the adventure of the armed forces. And he told me all kinds of amazing stories, sea stories, as I now know them, about the Navy. And I signed up on the spot. Wow. That's a story about actually of a lot of people. who joined the service, who don't have an intimate familiarity with it,

but are looking for some way to get ahead in their life, some benefit, and some sense of adventure. But I stayed for the mission, yeah, and just a chance to serve something greater than myself. And what is her experience once she joins the Navy? When she joins, it's the 1980s, and so there's still, at that point, something called the Combat Exclusion Band that's in place. and that prevents women from serving on combat ships or serving in combat aircraft and really limits the opportunity of women

to ascend to high ranks in the service. Wow, so when she arrives at the Navy, women, they can't even be on the ships that we most identify with the Navy itself, which to me sounds a little bit like being drafted to play professional basketball and being told that you can never go on the court. It's a pretty big deal.

Yeah, and there's an interesting, moment. So I think in 1989, she's one of 184 female surface warfare officers in the entire United States Navy. And one of those officers was chosen to command an auxiliary logistics ship. So this is a not a combat. Not a combat ship. Right, exactly. And it's such a big event that the Chief of Naval Operations, the job that Franketti will someday hold, writes a letter to all 184 female officers saying, I look forward to the day soon when this will cease to be a special event. And so she's at a moment where things are just beginning

to open up for women in the United States Navy. And it sounds like at pretty senior levels of the military, leaders want it to keep opening up from the content of that letter. Yeah, but that view isn't universally held, and it certainly wasn't universally held in the 1980s. The boss that I had at the time, he made it very clear to me that he didn't think, think women should be on our ship, and he was going to make sure that I did not succeed.

Franketti says she's basically told by her commanding officer that this experiment of having women on ships is not going to go anywhere. How did you deal with it, being discriminated against, knowing that a boss didn't want you to succeed? I just worked harder, and, you know, I was going to make sure that what he wanted to have happen wasn't going to happen. That attitude fuels her. It makes her work harder. And in the 90s, Clinton lifts the combat exclusion ban.

And that allows women to serve on combat vessels and in combat aircraft. And it really opens up possibilities for somebody like Admiral Frankelly, who then seizes that opportunity and rises up through the Navy. You were a destroyer captain, as was I. You were commander of Destroyer Squadron 21. The rampant lions. You were the lion queen. She commands an Arley Burke class destroyer, the U.S.

Ross. Later, two aircraft carrier strike groups, you know, the aircraft carrier is really central to the way the United States Navy fights. And so in 2013, she's the first woman to actually command naval forces in Korea, which is a real hot spot at that moment. And she also is a senior officer on the joint staff in the Pentagon. So in a relatively short amount of time, Frankelly goes from not a very short amount of time, Franketti goes from not being allowed onto combat ships to commanding those same ships. And I imagine by this point,

the word is out that she may be boss, boss material. Yeah. And in 2023, she's officially put up for the job, the top job in the Navy. You know, the Navy secretary selects three or four people who he thinks would be good for that job and submits that list to the Secretary of Defense, who at the time was a guy named Lloyd Austin. And after that list is put together, she's sort of widely rumored inside the Pentagon to be the front runner. But Austin looks at the list,

and he picks somebody else, a guy named Sam Paparo, who was a senior Navy officer in the Pacific. That's Austin's first choice. And when it goes to the White House, it's leaked to the press, and there are stories in the media saying, in a surprise move,

it looks like they're going to nominate Paparo rather than Admiral Frank Heddy for the job. Okay. So she has not gotten this job. She doesn't look like she's gotten this job. But then it lands in the White House under President Biden. He looks at the list of candidates, and he thinks, you know what, I want Frank Ketty for the job of Chief of Naval Operations, and let's keep Paparo in the job and have him be the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. China is really important to the Pentagon, and Paparo has spent more time in than almost any senior officer.

And so let's keep him focused on our most difficult problem when it comes to actual warfare. So just to be clear, President Biden overrules his Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, and says, I know you like this fella for the job of chief naval operations, but I prefer Lisa Frankeady and I make the final decision here. Yeah, and it's not unheard of, but it is unusual. Ultimately, this is the president's pick, and the president chose to exercise that authority that he has.

And why did he pick her? You know, one, she had a lot of experience. As I said before, she was considered the frontrunner for the job, so it wasn't like he was reaching deep into the ranks and picking an unknown. And two, I do think that Biden was interested in making history, interested in sending a message that a woman could rise to the top of the force. And so picking the first female chief of naval operations, the first woman to serve on the joint chiefs of staff, that was a really big deal for Biden.

But even as she's being confirmed, you know, there's a bit of a backlash to it on the hill. The committee meets today to consider the nomination of Admiral Lisa Frankelly to be the next chief of naval operations. At her confirmation hearing. She is pressed, as are many officers who are coming up for confirmation at this period, about, what she feels about DEI, what she feels about some of the books that are touting the importance of DEI, whether it has a place in the United States Navy. So again, I'm very focused on warfighting, warfighters and winning. And she largely says that's not what she's about.

I will develop a process and I will focus on warfighting, warfighters and winning. Thank you. She's about the Navy and she's about naval operations and naval warfare, and that's her focus. not diversity. With that, I will adjourn a hearing. But knowing what I know about Pete Heggseth and what's coming around the corner, I'm guessing that all of this,

including how she was chosen by Biden, is at the heart of her eventual demise. Yeah, so she's confirmed by the Senate with only one dissenting vote. I think it's 95 to 1 with some people not voting because they weren't there. So she's got overwhelming support from the Senate.

Republican and Democrats think she's qualified. But Pete Hickset is clearly bothered by this. And that's why this book is going to tick a lot of people off. Women and men are different. Women shouldn't be in combat at all. And so he publishes a book in 2024 in which he really takes aim at her, among others, but her on a couple of pages in which he says

and argues that she's not qualified for this job and she only got the job because she was a woman. Because of how Washington works, they're going to change the standards, they're going to push for quotas. And he identifies Admiral Franquette as emblematic of everything that was wrong with the Biden approach, as somebody who prioritizes diversity over competence. Any general that was involved, General Admiral, whatever, that was involved in any of the DEI woke shit, it's got to go.

And at that point, Heggseth is a Fox and Friends weekend host and a military expert for Fox. And so within a matter of months after this book comes out, Hegseth is picked by President-elect Trump at that moment to be his Secretary of Defense. It's a really controversial pick. Hegseth is not very experienced. And when Hegseth is chosen by Trump, Frank Heddy has read his book or is aware of what's in his book, and she realizes that her days are probably numbered.

And what does she do? Well, at that point, she calls together all the four stars in the United States Navy. I think there are a half dozen of them or so to the Pentagon. and they discuss what to do if she's fired. Who should replace her? And I think she's also really concerned about the politicization of the force, that these forces will sort of divide the Navy,

divide admirals against each other, will lead to people campaigning for the job and freelancing. And so she basically says to them, like, hey, this is a really big, stressful movement. We need to put the United States Navy ahead of ourselves and our own career ambitions. So even at this moment when

she knows her career is probably over. She's saying, how do we protect the Navy? Yeah, how do we protect the institution? But what she doesn't know at the time is that someone in that four-star meeting that she had is quietly doing exactly what she cautioned not to do, which is reaching out to Secretary Hagseth and trying to position himself to take her job. We'll be right back. So Greg, tell us about this naval officer who does,

the very thing Franquetty doesn't want anyone to do, which is to basically begin lobbying for her job even before she's been fired. You mentioned his name earlier, Darrell Cottle. Yeah, so he's a highly accomplished and decorated admiral. My early Navy days were on board submarines. Comes up through the submarine fleet. He commands U.S. submarines in the Pacific. You're surrounded by a nuclear reactor and enough ordinance to make anyone a little nervous. Then he's in charge of U.S. Fleet Forces Command, which is a really important East Coast command that essentially trains and make sure Navy ships are ready to go to war. Down there, I had to constantly ask myself, am I thinking clearly? Am I thinking strategically? Are we doing the right things for the right reasons and at the right time? And those questions haven't changed.

He does very well on that, so well, in fact, that, you know, when they're considering Admiral Franquetti, in 2023, that Admiral Cottle is one of the people on the list the Navy puts forward to Secretary Austin as a possible candidate for the Chief of Naval Operations job. Ah, interesting. So he's in the mix for that big aid job under President Biden. Yeah, and he really wants it. It's clear that he really wants it. But the Navy, I think, views him as a better candidate for U.S. Strategic Command, which is the command that oversees all of our nuclear weapons. It's a really important command. It's not as high profile. The span of control, the span of what you can accomplish is not as great. And so I think Admiral Cottle

is much more interested in the Chief of Naval Operations job, that much more high-profile job. Hmm. And it sounds like when he recognizes that Frankeady is probably in trouble in the same way that she herself recognizes that he begins to make clear he wants the job. How does he do that? Yeah, so it's really interesting. And this is something that I had never encountered before. So, you know, Hegseth is nominated for the job. It's not clear that he's going to get the job. It's looking pretty dicey for him. And so what we heard from several officials familiar with the interaction is that at this point, Admiral Caudill directs a senior officer on his staff to reach out to Hegseth, to help Hegseth prepare for his confirmation hearing. He makes this offer several times over

the course of the month of December. The call never happens. But the message gets through to Secretary Hexeth, that this is somebody who's kind of on the team. Interesting. And perhaps a little bit bold for the military. What else do we learn about Caudill's communications with Hexathe? So two days after Admiral Franquette is fired, a senior officer on his staff again reaches out to Hegsa's brother, this time of a much more overtly political message, essentially that there's no one more in line with Secretary Hexas' vision for remaking the military than Admiral Caudill, and that Admiral Caudill wants to remove, quote, woke barriers that he sees as weakening the force. And it seems like the point of this text

message was to show, hey, I'm politically and ideologically aligned with you and your vision for the military. Huh. I mean, this sounds quite literally like what Franquetti would be asking that no one ever do, which is not just reaching out and lobbying for a job, which is, which is, sounds like she would disapprove of, but saying, I'm with you ideologically, I'm your person, I will be loyal. That sounds quite out of protocol, out of the norm. Yeah, it was very much a violation of protocol. This is really unusual because we expect our military officers to be apolitical. We don't want Republican generals and Democratic generals. We want them to serve the institution and the country. And so when you have people short-circuiting

the process and auditioning for jobs, It really starts to undermine trust in the institution. And I think not just Admiral Frankeady would have objected to that, but I think most of the chiefs of any of the services would have had a problem with that kind of outreach. You know, there's a concept in the Navy, a saying, it goes ship, shipmate, self. And at the core of that is that the survival and success of your ship comes first. The next is your sailors, your shipmates, the people who you serve with, and you put yourself last.

And when you politicize the force, when you put ideology or ambition ahead of those things, you really start to break down the bonds that make for an effective fighting force, the bonds that make people willing to sacrifice their lives for something bigger. And what comes of Caudill's outreach? Well, the first thing that happens is Hegseth fires Frank Hetty. And remember, at this time, he's only about a month. into the job, so he's still pretty new.

He gets a list of three nominees of people who the Navy thinks should get this job. Admiral Cottle is not on that list. And so there's a meeting in the Pentagon in which HECSeth is briefed on the sort of the three options that the Navy is recommending,

and he looks at that list and says, where's Caudill? Potentially, or even probably, because he's remembering all these texts and emails that are coming through from this very senior Navy guy saying, I'm your guy, and I'm with you. Yes.

And it turns out that Admiral Caudill is the only person that Secretary Hegsath interviews for the Chief of Naval Operations job. And so he picks him. His nomination is set to go to the White House when a problem arises. Which is what?

So Admiral Cottle has a significant inspector general complaint against him. It's essentially a year old, but it's been sitting in the system. and it needs to be dealt with. This is what you say in Specter General, you basically mean like the kind of internal HR world of the Navy, it sounds like. The IG is the internal watchdog.

So what happens is the complaint centers around some remarks he made to sailors at essentially an awards banquet. And they're talking about the Navy's sexual assault awareness program. And Cottle says, look, if I strip naked and cover myself in honey and go walking through the forest and I get attacked by a bear, I have some responsibility for that attack. Another one that he uses is, you know,

if I put on gold chains and a fancy gold watch and I go walking through Harlem and I get assaulted, you know, I bear some responsibility for my decisions. So eventually some of the sailors who hear these remarks complain to the IG. Greg, I'm thinking back to the email, that Cottle wrote to Heggseth, where he says, I'm with you on being anti-woke and changing the culture of the military.

And it sounds like with these kinds of comments, he's definitely not on board with the progressive culture that has arrived in places like the U.S. military that would say that comments like that are not appropriate. I think that's right, yeah. And so when Admiral Cottle has to deal with this, he reaches out to a lawyer named Tim Parletory, Pellatory has represented other naval officers dealing with these IG complaints.

He also represented Secretary Hegseh, when Secretary Hegseh was accused of sexual assault a few years ago. Now he's working as a special advisor inside the Pentagon. Wow. So Caudill's connections to Hegseff keep getting bigger and more complicated. So at this point, where does Cottle's nomination stand? Where does it go? So the IG concludes that he didn't do anything wrong. And then that clears the pathway for Admiral Caudill's nomination to go to the White House. Good morning, everyone. This ceremony marks an important transition for our Navy.

So last summer, summer of 2025, he succeeds Admiral Frankelly and becomes the new Chief of Naval Operations. With the promise to work every day to make our sailors, better warriors, our families more supported, and in his speech, he brings up this idea of sailors first and serving with integrity. Sailors are my priority. I pledge to lead with integrity, honor, and resolve. And he also parrots Heggseth's language of domination and strength. To ensure that our Navy remains and forever will be the most dominant, lethal, and credible maritime fighting force the world has ever known. Now let's get to work.

Thank you. Greg, help make sense of this firing and this hiring. We start with Lisa Franketti. who President Biden picks, I think, pretty self-consciously because he wants to have a woman in that role. Hegset comes along and says, that's not how I'm going to be doing business, so fires her. And picks Cottle, it seems in large part, because Cottle shares Hengs-Sass ideology and has found multiple ways to communicate that. So how should we be thinking about all of that together? Yeah, I should note that spokesmen for both the Secretary Hegseth and Admiral Cottle have said that these decisions were made on merit.

But it seems pretty clear that the firings were not about merit. You know, it's completely legitimate to fire somebody for competence if they make a mistake or lose a war. But Frankelly did nothing wrong as far as we can tell. She was fired and Caudill was hired, at least in part for reasons tied to politics or ideology. And that's a really dangerous place for the military team. go. And dangerous exactly why. Because I guess there must be plenty of people who imagine that other senior military officials have found ways to ingratiate themselves with military leaders and to communicate that, you know, I'm your person. Why does what happened here seem so problematic?

Well, I think when you start firing people for political reasons, it's not just the person you fire, but it's the message that sends throughout the entire force that, hey, if you want to move up, if you want to succeed, there are political litmus tests or political gates that you have to pass through. And then you start making day-to-day decisions, maybe even really important military ones,

based on, will this make the boss happy? Because that's kind of how I got my job in the first place. Yeah. War is a really tough, complicated endeavor, as we're seeing in Iran right now. And so you want your best warfighters, not your most politically aligned war fighters to be promoted. You want people to be able to tell the boss when they're wrong.

You want senior officers to provide unvarnished military advice, even when it may not be popular or what the civilians want to hear. Now, have other administrations initially distrusted the generals they inherited from past presidents? Yes, that has happened. But they never took steps to fire and replace them with more ideologically aligned officers. because they knew it was a really slippery slope. It could lead to places that weren't good for the military or for the country. I just want to end by spending a moment on the other side of this tale,

the person we started this episode with, and that is Lisa Frankeady, and the demography of the military, because the reason why all the changes were made to let her rise up through the ranks, and the reason why ultimately it seems President Biden put so much emphasis on having her be in their role is there was a desire to have women leading and lead branches of the military. What is the status under Hegsef, who is clearly not sharing that priority of women in the leadership of the military? Yeah, so this time for the first time in at least a decade, if not longer, there will be no women nominated to Admiral Rank. Women make up about 21% of the Navy, and so that means you've got a leadership of the Navy

that increasingly looks less and less like the force that it oversees. I think, you know, it also means that young female officers who are coming up have fewer people who provide a sort of a pathway to success, who show them what the opportunities available to them are. I think that's tough for them. I think it's also heartbreaking for people like Admiral Frientie and other senior female officers who fought hard to get where they got. Well, Greg, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Of course, thanks for having me.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to another day. For the first time in U.S. history, the gross national debt surpassed $40 trillion, an ominous milestone in the country's inability to balance its checkbook. The U.S. massively outspends what it earns to pay for its military, safety net programs like Medicare and Social Security, and for tax cuts like those passed by President Trump. Trump has repeatedly promised to restore financial order, but since his first election back in 2016, the national debt has doubled and,

This year alone, the United States is already on track to borrow $2 trillion. Today's episode was produced by Shannon Lynn, Adrian Hurst, and Jessica Chum. It was edited by Michael Benoit and Patricia Willens, and contains music by Alicia B. Itube and Dan Powell. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for the daily. I'm Michael Barrow. See you tomorrow.