Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blocked the promotions of at least seven Navy officers hand-picked by a board of senior admirals, removing all women and most minority candidates from the list of nominees for promotions.
The intervention left a slate of 22 one-star admiral nominees that includes no women, despite females making up roughly 21 percent of the active-duty Navy, and only two nonwhite officers, despite racial minorities accounting for approximately 38 percent of the force, reported the New York Times.
At least two of the removed officers are women, two are Black men, and three are white men.
Four current and former defense officials, speaking anonymously to discuss sensitive personnel matters, said Hegseth's actions are highly unusual and appear to breach Pentagon rules, which permit the defense secretary to remove officers from promotion lists only when new information raises specific questions about their fitness to serve — not on ideological grounds.
Internal records suggest some officers were targeted because their names appeared on a website devoted to identifying "woke" military personnel, with infractions as minor as having served as a diversity liaison officer two decades ago. One highly regarded officer — a nuclear-trained surface warfare officer and former aide to a four-star admiral — was pulled from the list shortly after her name surfaced on the site for that decades-old role.
Hegseth also pushed senior Navy officials to place Capt. William Francis Jr., a Navy SEAL who serves as Hegseth’s special assistant, on the one-star list, but his lack of command experience made him ineligible for promotion and he was not selected, according to current and former Navy officials.
Since taking office, Hegseth has fired or sidelined nearly three dozen senior officers. Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, noted in recent Senate testimony that nearly 60 percent of the senior officers Hegseth has dismissed are female or Black — a group that currently makes up fewer than 20 percent of all generals and admirals.
Among those previously pushed out were General Charles Q. Brown Jr., the second African American to chair the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman ever to lead the Navy.
Hegseth has repeatedly declined to explain individual dismissals or removals, telling lawmakers he does not discuss such matters "out of respect for those officers" while speaking broadly of correcting years of what he called "gender and demographic engineering."
The Pentagon denied that race or gender played any role in promotion decisions, and the Navy declined to comment.