Pete Hegseth’s Enemies List Includes Historic Navy Admiral
Plus: The House Ethics Committee is bursting at the seams.
ADM. LISA FRANCHETTI MADE HISTORY last year when the Senate confirmed her to be chief of naval operations, the senior-most officer in the Navy. It made her the first woman ever on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
But her position might soon be in jeopardy. Donald Trump’s team is reportedly crafting a list of top Pentagon officers to fire. Why Franchetti would be on that list is fairly clear: Pete Hegseth, the veteran and Fox News anchor nominated to serve as secretary of defense, has explicitly mentioned her as someone he views as detrimental to the American military.
In his book, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, Hegseth took aim at Franchetti for several reasons. First, was that she had no combat experience.1
Second was that she got her masters degree from the University of Phoenix online—a criticism, we should note, that is at odds with his routine bashing of elite universities (despite having received degrees from both Princeton and Harvard himself).
Third, Hegseth expressed dismay that Franchetti was vice chief of naval operations prior to her current role, which he notes “has almost never gone to the vice-chief in decades; rather they promote the freshest commander.” That isn’t the whole story, though. When then-Vice CNO Adm. Bill Moran was nominated and confirmed for the top job in 2019, he abruptly resigned after a scandal involving inappropriate behavior with female colleagues. He did so before ever taking the reins on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Michael Gilday, then a three-star admiral, took his place because the flag officer bench was so severely depleted by the “Fat Leonard” corruption scandal.2
Tradition aside, it’s the president’s prerogative to nominate whichever officer he thinks can best do the job. Trump passed over Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein for chairman of the Joint Chiefs in favor of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley. In doing so, he ignored the recommendations of the secretary of defense. If Trump can buck tradition, so can Biden.
Hegseth’s primary concern, however, is that Franchetti is a woman:
Franchetti was not a trans woman, and this could be a strike against her in this administration.
But no, Biden shocked the world when he went with another inexperienced first, promoting Franchetti. If naval operations suffers, at least we can hold our heads high. Because at least we have another first! The first female member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—hooray.
For social justice idealogues, [public relations] matters more than reality. Politics is all about optics instead of results. Naval operations being weakened won’t matter to anyone in the legacy media. In the world of Annie Get Your Gun, “anything you can do, I can do better.” It’s a great number in a musical performance of a traveling [W]estern entertainment sharpshooter who reads dialogue back in the nineteenth century.
War isn’t about inclusion. It’s not about safety and empathy. It’s the terrible reality that exists when all law and order has broken down, and the only thing left is force. At that time, the goal must be winning—and reality. Not public relations.
I spoke to several members of the Senate Armed Services Committee about this passage in Hegseth’s book, their personal experience with Franchetti since her promotion, and whether they were concerned that she would be given the boot in the Trump administration.