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

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From New York Times, I'm Mike Obabaro. This is The Daily. For the past 18 months, Secretary of Defense Pete Hexeth has remade the top ranks of the U.S. military, dismissing or sideline many who's raws, he believes, was aded by DEI and replacing them with officers who fit his definition of marriage. In the process, many argue. Hexeth is prioritizing loyalty to him and his ideas

over loyalty to the military itself. Today, my calling, Greg Jaffee, takes us inside the hiring and fire for a single job that's become a case study for Hexeth's approach. It's Thursday, August 20th.

Greg, welcome to The Daily. I know this is your first time on the show. 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 Hexeth'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 Hexeth 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. So, it's a really broad campaign to sort of reclaim a 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. Vice Chief of Staff were all fired, Friday night. And no specific explanations were given. It's a pretty significant purge, some of the top ranks of the military. Right, we did a whole episode about Seq 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 fireings are continuing. Hexeth has fired more than a dozen generals and

admiral 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, admiral's in general. Huge. Yep, yep, but in reality is 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, often 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 Franketti and Darrell Caudel, hoping it would help us”

understand in a broad sense how secretary Hexeth was really changing the military in ways that we're really transformative. So let's start with what you found about Lisa Franketti, the member of that duo who was fired by Hexeth. 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,

naval officers. 17. I was going to medill, the most amazing journalism school in the country,

and that was going to be a reporter. She was a coxon 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 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, you tell me more, and they talked about free textbooks, the chance to see the world. And a recruiter sold her on the adventure of the Armed Forces.

And you told me all kinds of amazing stories, sea stories, as I now know them,

right, about the Navy, and I signed up on the spot. Wow. So that's a story about actually 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. I mean, some sense of adventure. But I stayed for the mission, yeah, and just to chance to serve something greater than myself. And what does 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 a professional basketball and being told that

you can never go on the court. That'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 logistic ship. So this is a not a combat ship. Right, exactly. And it's such a big event that the Chief of Naval Operations, the job that Frank Eddie 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 women should

“be on our ship and he was going to make sure that I did not succeed. Frank Eddie 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 happened 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 Frank Eddie who then ceases that opportunity and rises up through the Navy. You were a destroyer captain. This was I, you were a commander of destroyer Squadron 21. The rampant alliance. You were the lion queen. She commands an early birth class destroyer, the USS 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 hotspot 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, Frank Eddie goes from not being allowed onto combat ships to command it 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

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 Eddie for the job. Okay. So she has not gone this job. She doesn't look like she's gotten this job. But then at lands in the White House under President Biden, he looks at the list of candidates. And he thinks, you know what? I want Frank Eddie for the

job of chief old naval operations. And let's keep Paparo in the job and have him be the head of US Indo-Pacific Command. China is really important to the Pentagon. And Paparo has spent more time in Asia 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 over rules 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 Frank Eddie 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 front runner 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. Interesting 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 Frank Eddie 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 and warfighting. Warfighters in winning. And she largely says that's not what she's about. I will develop a process and I will focus on warfighting. Warfighters in 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 Exeth 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 one with some people not voting because they weren't there. So she's got overwhelming support from the Senate. Republican to Democrats think she's qualified. But Pete Exeth is clearly bothered by this.

“And that's why this book is going to take 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 at a moral friend Kettie 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 will shit. It's got to go. And at that point, Exeth 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, Exeth has picked by President Electrump at that moment to be his secretary of defense. It's a really controversial pick.

Exeth is not very experienced. And when Exeth has chosen by Trump, Frank Eddie 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 her 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 animals against each other. We'll lead to people campaigning for the job and

freelancing. And so she basically says to them, like, hey, this is a really big, stressful moment.

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 Hexeth and trying to position himself to take her job. We'll do it back. This is H.y. Solsberger. I'm the publisher of the New York Times. I oversee our news

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That's it. Not asking you to click on any link, just subscribe to a real news organization with real journalists doing firsthand fact-based reporting. And if you already do, thank you. So Greg tells about this Naval officer who does the very thing. Frank Eddie doesn't want anyone to do, which is to basically begin lobbying for her job, even before she's been fired, he mentioned his name earlier, Darrell Coddle. Yeah, so he's a highly accomplished and decorated

admiral. My early Navy days are on board submarines. It 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 makes her 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. It does very well on that. So well in fact, that when they're considering admiral Frank Eddie in 2023, that admiral Coddle 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. Interesting. So he's in the mix for that big-age 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 kind of accomplish is not as great. And so I think admiral Coddle is much more interested”

in the Chief of Naval Operations job, that much more high profile job. And it sounds like when he recognizes that Frank Eddie 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, Hexeth 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 Coddle directs a senior officer on his staff to reach out to Hexeth to help Hexeth 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 Coddle's communications with Hexeth? So two days after Admiral Frank Eddie is fired, a senior officer on his staff again reaches out to Hexeth's brother, this time of a much more overtly political message. Essentially that there's no one more in line with Secretary Hexeth's vision for remaking the military than Admiral Coddle. And that Admiral Coddle

point of this text message was to show, hey, I'm politically and ideologically aligned with you

and your vision for the military. I mean, this sounds quite literally like what Frank Eddie would be asking that no one ever do, which is not just reaching out and lobbying for a job, which sounds like she would just approve 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 a

political. We don't want Republican generals in Democratic generals. We want them to serve the institution and the country. And so when you have people's short circling the process and auditioning

“for jobs, it really starts to undermine trust in the institution. And I think not just Admiral”

Frank Eddie 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 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 coddles outreach? Well, the first thing that happens is Hickseth Fire's Frank Eddie. 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 Codel is not on that list. And so interesting. There's a meeting in the Pentagon in which Hickseth is briefed on the sort of the three options that the Navy is recommending. And he looks at that list and says, where's Codel? Um, 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 Codel is the only person that Secretary Hickseth introduced 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 Codel has a significant inspector general complaint against him. And 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, Inspector 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 Codel 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 Codel wrote to Higgseth where he says, I'm with you on being anti-woke and changing the culture. 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 US military that would say that comments like that

“or not appropriate. I think that's right. Yeah. And so when Admiral Codel has to deal with this,”

he reaches out to a lawyer named Tim Perlatory. Perlatory has represented other naval officers dealing with these IG complaints. He also represented Secretary Higgseth when Secretary Higgseth was accused of sexual assault a few years ago. Now he's working as a special advisor inside the Pentagon. Wow. So Codel's connections to Higgseth keep getting bigger and more complicated. So at this point, where does Codel's nomination stand? What's it go? So the IG concludes that he

didn't do anything wrong. And then that clears the pathway for Admiral Codel's nomination to go to the White House. Good morning, everyone. There's ceremony marks an important transition

Chief of Naval Operations. With the promise to work every day to make our sailors, better warriors, our families more supported, and our cognitive 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 parents Higgseth'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. Craig, 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. Higgseth comes along and says, that's not how I'm going to be doing business so firesher. And picks Codel. It seems in large part because Codel shares Higgseth's 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 spokesman for both the Secretary Higgseth and Admiral Codel have said that these decisions were made on merit, but it seems pretty clear that the fireings were not

about merit. You know, it's completely legitimate to fire somebody for competence if they make mistake or lose a war, but Franketti did nothing wrong as far as we can tell. She was fired and Codel was hired, at least in part for reasons tied to politics or ideology. And that's a really dangerous place for the military to 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, their political litmus test 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, wars are really tough, complicated, endeavour as we're seeing in Iran right now. And so you want your best warfighters, not your most politically aligned warfighters to be promoted. You want people to be able to tell the boss when they're wrong.

You want senior officers to provide unvernished 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 Frank Heady, 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 Higgs F? 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 us sort of a pathway to success who show them what the opportunity is available to them are. I think that's tough for them. I think it's also heartbreaking for people like Admiral Frank Heady and others seeing your female officers who fought hard to get where they got. Okay, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Of course, thanks for having me.

Here's what else you need to another day. For the first time in U.S. history

“the gross national debt surpassed $40 trillion and 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 Litt, Adrian Hurst,

“And Jessica Chuck. It was edited by Michael Benoit and Patricia Wilkins and contains music by Alicia”

but YouTube and Dan Powell. Our theme music is by Wonderland. This episode was engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Babardo. See you tomorrow. This week on The Wire Cutter Show. Do I creams actually work? The results that we saw with the Sarah Vayne were so dramatic that we would call each other over to have a look because it was so dramatic you almost couldn't believe it. We talked to Beauty Rider Abbey

cause Zulchick about her rigorous testing and surprising findings. Tune into The Wire Cutter Show on The New York Times app or wherever you like to listen.