As Donald Trump takes the oath of office once again on Monday to be commander in chief, some of the generals and admirals he will command may wonder if his first order to them will be “you’re fired.”
Even as a potential war brewing with China over Taiwan and the South China Sea looms large in the plans of Congress and the general staff, Trump and his team have said that they intend for the most senior military leaders to be loyal to the president’s agenda – and to the president himself – in ways that close observers of military leadership and organization find troubling.
“One of the most important norms in American civil-military relations is that the military is responsive to elective leadership, irrespective of anybody’s politics,” said Kori Schake, senior fellow and the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Subjecting general officers to a political litmus test “will convey to the American public that their military leadership is political, and that will diminish trust In the military. It will hurt recruiting and retention, and it will fundamentally change the way the American public looks at its military leadership. I think it’s a terrible idea. I hope President Trump doesn’t adopt it,” Schake added.
And yet, this is what Trump has vowed to do. The questions are when, and how, and to whom.
The American Accountability Foundation, a conservative activist organization helmed by a former Republican senate staffer, began circulating a list of 20 colonels, generals and admirals last month who had expressed support for diversity and inclusion initiatives in the military, such as they are. Admiral Lisa Franchetti, chief of naval operations – the service chief for the US navy – is the highest-ranking officer of the list. Many on the list are intelligence chiefs or commanders in Europe or Asia.
A Wall Street Journal report widely cited by military observers said the incoming administration would create “warrior boards” of retired military commanders friendly to the Trump agenda to review – and purge – officers who had supported antiracist initiatives.
The issue arose directly during confirmation hearings for Trump’s embattled nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth. US senator Jack Reed, a Democrat representing Rhode Island and ranking member on the senate armed service committee, described “purge panels” under consideration by the incoming administration.
Reed asked Hegseth to explain why military officers who upheld anti-discrimination laws and policies enacted under both Democratic and Republican administrations should be punished for that effort. Reed referenced emails in which Hegseth advocated firing “any general who has carried water for Obama and Biden’s extra-constitutional agenda-driven transformation of our military. Clean house and start over.”
Hegseth argued in response that no general officer had been held accountable for the botched US withdrawal in Afghanistan, and that accountability was necessary.
“The military was a forerunner in courageous racial integration,” Hegseth said, referring to integration orders after the second world war. “The DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] policies of today are not the same as what happened back then. They’re dividing troops inside formations, causing commanders to walk on eggshells.”
Hegseth dodged the question about whether “warrior boards” of retired senior officers would be convened to review the records of combatant commanders, service chiefs and others, suggesting that every senior officer will be reviewed.
“The rhetoric, sometimes from candidate Trump, but often from people around Trump, was really quite bombastic and extreme,” said Peter Feaver, a professor in Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, and director of the Duke program in American grand strategy. “If you went on what they wrote or in TV interviews and stuff like that, you could come to the conclusion that there’s going to be bloodletting equivalent to Stalin’s purges from the 1930s.”
Feaver suggests that the administration could make do by firing a few senior officers to check the anti-DEI box as a political victory and move on. “It would put everybody else on notice and say, if we did that to this person, we can to you,” he said. “It would be politicizing, unless there was actual cause because they had underperformed or violated something in some tangible way. If it’s just symbolic, it’s going to be politicizing, but that would be relatively minor and actually somewhat within the bounds of precedent.”
Shortly after winning election, Reuters reported that the transition team was drawing up plans to fire senior officers. Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald and a chair of the transition team – as well as Trump’s pick for commerce secretary – said in the days before the election that Trump made a mistake elevating officers who were “Democrats” to positions of authority.
“He made a mistake. He thought they were generals. They were Democratic generals,” Lutnick said, describing former Trump secretary of defense Jim Mattis, former chief of staff Mark Kelly, and other general officers who served in senior leadership as treasonous.
The Reuters report said one focus of the new administration would be purging general officers connected to retired general Mark Milley, former chair of the joint chiefs of the armed services under Trump. Milley has been sharply critical of Trump, describing him as “the most dangerous person in America” and “fascist to the core”.
Joe Biden issued a pre-emptive pardon to Milley on Monday, almost as he was stepping out of the door at the White House as president for the last time, to protect him in case Trump tries to have him prosecuted.
Trump’s authority to fire a general – any general – isn’t at question, said Katherine Kuzminski, deputy director of studies and the director of the Military, Veterans and Society program at the Center for a New American Security. Generals used to get fired all the time, she said. The question is why.
“It is not unfair to say there needs to be accountability for general officers,” she said. “What is alarming … is if we’re going to be explicit about the fact that a that a uniformed leader who is not acting in a partisan way can’t have their job unless they align with the president they’re serving under: that raises a lot of questions about the profession of arms being able to self-regulate.”
Appointing a general or admiral to an important billet like command of the Pacific fleet or commandant of the Marine Corps or running one of the military’s 11 combatant commands has long been an intricate process requiring months of preparation and internal debate. These jobs carry a rank of O-9 or O-10 in military terminology; a lieutenant general or general, vice-admiral or admiral. Any officer ranked O-4 or higher – a lieutenant commander in the navy or coast guard or a major in the other services – is confirmed by the Senate and serves at the pleasure of the president, Kuzminski said.
Officers at ranks O-9 and O-10 – lieutenant generals and vice-admirals and above – hold on to their higher rank as a result of being assigned a billet that carries that rank. These officer prepare for such roles over careers spanning decades, through both Republican and Democratic administrations, she said.
“The president can choose not to accept a proposed individual for promotion or for assignment, and he can fire those who are currently in it,” Kuzminski said. “What he can’t do on his own is say ‘I’m going to install my guy there, right?’ It still has to go through the promotion process within the service. So, if he were to relieve a combatant commander or a superintendent, then the process starts all over again to determine who the next candidate is, who’s eligible and competitive within the service.”
In 2023, Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville exercised a rarely used privilege to block the promotion of more than 400 senior military leaders – about half the senior general and admiral roles in the military – as part of a failed strategy, ultimately, to oppose new Pentagon rules that allow reimbursement for travel when a service member has to go out of state to get an abortion or other reproductive care.
Important jobs were filled by acting leaders without the authority to initiate policy changes. About 500 officers landed in their roles all at once about a year ago, when Tuberville finally lifted the year-long hold. The military is still digging out of the hole, Feaver said.
“A fairly well tuned leadership management personnel system that was designed to create a smooth process and certain amount of predictability which families need … Tuberville disrupted all of that,” Feaver said. “It’s going to take a couple years of normality to finally get the things back to where it was before. But of course, if that normality is interrupted with large scale arbitrary firings, then you’re just going to extend the damage, compound the damage and extend the length of it.”
The holds had an unintended side effect, however: they gave conservatives arguing for purges evidence that the military could cope with the absence of a general or two.
“They said, we could – we should – be firing 500 people,” Feaver said. “That number was close to the number that Senator Tuberville had put a hold on. And so, they’re saying, ‘Yeah, we could remove that many and it wouldn’t hurt the country.’ Which, of course, was nonsense. But it was nonsense that they had to say in order to minimize the damage being done by Senator Tuberville.”
