Hegseth blocking promotions is even worse than it looks

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. Andrew Harnik

/Getty Images North America

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth just hijacked more promotions of high-ranking service members, this time blocking career professionals with exemplary records who were on track to become one-star generals and admirals. Not only is Hegseth’s behavior unusual, there is no clear legal authority for what he is doing.

Congress entrusted military promotions largely to the respective promotion boards and Secretaries of the Military Departments, not the Secretary of Defense. Although 10 U.S.C. § 629 empowers the President with removal authority, a longstanding executive order limits the Secretary of Defense’s removal authority to grades below colonel or captain, not the general or admiral promotions Hegseth has blocked. The Pentagon’s own regulations restrict grounds for removing an officer from a promotions list to specific circumstances like moral, mental, or professional deficiencies, none of which were present in Hegseth’s removals.

It’s obvious that a disproportionate number of Hegseth’s blocked, delayed, or demoted officers are women and people of color. However, while mainstream headlines suggest Hegseth is motivated by race and gender animus, an even worse—and more dangerous— likelihood is that he is weeding out those he deems “ideologically incompatible” with how he and Trump plan to use the military.

Hegseth likes to emphasize that “every officer serves at the pleasure of the president,” arguing that Trump’s policy goals require removing commanders “tied to the culture” of previous administrations. He argues that past promotions were based on race and gender instead of qualifications, but military records refute those claims, and there is no evidence that any promotions he blocked were attributable to anything other than merit.

An unqualified hack defends his own

Hegseth, a former Fox News bobble head, is notoriously unqualified to serve as Secretary of Defense, which seems to have been Trump’s point in naming him. He was a mid-level National Guard officer, had no senior leadership role in the military, and had no experience anywhere that qualified him to oversee three million personnel and an annual budget of $800 billion.

More dangerous than his lack of qualifications is his bloodlust. As a media commentator, he lobbied aggressively for presidential pardons for service members convicted or accused of notorious war crimes, including Army Lt. Clint Lorance, convicted of murdering two Afghan civilians, and Maj. Matt Golsteyn, who admitted during an interview for the CIA that he and another soldier took an alleged Taliban bomb-maker off base in 2010, shot him, and buried his remains. Trump granted full pardons to both.

In Iraq, Hegseth’s own unit was nicknamed “Kill Company” and he kept a ‘kill board’ that tallied kills, including dead civilians, expressing daring contempt for the military’s strict rules of engagement. It’s anyone’s guess what gruesome deeds he got up to. Today, he barks a constant mantra about “war fighters” and “lethality” and sees violence and unrestrained power as a distinct virtue.

Ineptitude with a platitude chaser

Hegseth’s tenure has been marred by a series of high-profile blunders, including the SignalGate security breach, his ‘dirty line’ Pentagon internet setup, and unforced diplomatic errors such as upbraiding NATO allies without understanding the subject matter. Just as Trump governs by spectacle over substance, Hegseth manages by platitude. His attempts to project authority through chest thumping—“Maximum lethality not tepid legality”— like his sophomoric speech to the Generals at Quantico, routinely fall flat and inspire parody.

Hegseth’s embrace of violence over circumspection (“Lethality is our calling card”) while rejecting what he calls ‘stupid rules of engagement’ reveals an almost pathological immaturity. While pushing back against operational restraints, i.e., military rules of engagement, and weeding out generals who don’t suit him, he insists that, under him, there will be “No politically correct wars.”

What he’s really weeding out are legal protocols in order to elevate ‘maximum lethality’ in pursuit of politically incorrect and illegal wars: Trump’s.

History is clear on why the military should never be politicized

Throughout history, authoritarian regimes have tried to put professional militaries under the direct control of their own political movements. Recognizing that an independent officer corps poses an existential threat to one-party rule, in Nazi Germany, Hitler systematically dismantled the autonomy of the traditional Wehrmacht, and required all soldiers to swear a personal oath of loyalty to him rather than to the state or constitution.

In the former Soviet Union, Stalin subjected the Red Army to the Communist Party’s political commissar system, embedding party officials at every level of command to monitor ideological conformity. From 1937–38, Stalin’s purges decimated the senior officer corps, to ensure political fealty, even at catastrophic cost to combat readiness on the eve of World War II.

Historical clarity is not confined to Europe. In Maoist China, the People’s Liberation Army was not a conventional national military but was the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party. Mao’s dictum that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” led to political loyalty campaigns purging those deemed insufficiently loyal. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein constructed an elaborate system of Republican Guard formations and tribal loyalties to prevent any single military institution from possessing enough power to threaten him. Officers were promoted based on personal loyalty rather than merit, and suspected disloyalty was met with execution.

Throughout history, subordinating military professionalism to political fealty, which is what Hegseth is really doing, has produced armies that were reliable instruments of internal repression but dysfunctional when facing real external threats. Since Hegseth and Trump are both fixated on domestic “enemies within” and hope to deploy the military against Americans (internal repression), it’s likely Hegseth’s promotions are less about demographics and more about fortifying top brass willing to break the law, by removing from the ranks those who are likely not so willing.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.