President Donald Trump has been repeatedly criticized for creating a Defense Department that repeatedly purges top military leaders. Now a new report reveals that, as a result of these firings, top senior officials worry that Americans will pay with their blood.
“A series of firings and feuds initiated by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has left the Army essentially rudderless as it struggles to deal with the threat posed by cheap, deadly drones and missiles that have pounded U.S. bases in the Middle East,” reported The New York Times' Greg Jaffe, Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper and Adam Entous on Tuesday. “The Army has not had a chief of staff, the service’s top officer, since Mr. Hegseth fired Gen. Randy George without explanation in April, and there are no signs that he is close to filling the position, said current and former officials speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.”
They added that under Hegseth, the Pentagon “has forced out at least three senior officers who had been viewed as potential successors to General George.” Additionally the Army Secretary, Daniel P. Driscoll, “is also expected to leave the administration in the next few months and has already moved out of the large family house that he was renting in Fort Myer, outside Washington, officials said.”
Writing about the scope of Hegseth’s purges, they added that “beyond General George, Mr. Hegseth has fired or forced out a half-dozen senior officers — a generation of the Army’s most combat-hardened leaders — thinning the service’s top ranks for the next several years, officials said.”
They continued, “General George struggled to forge a relationship with Mr. Hegseth, who arrived at the Pentagon with deep suspicions of the Army’s senior leadership rooted in his own experience, Army officials said. After deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Hegseth was forced to leave the National Guard for tattoos that were deemed extremist.”
Hegseth reportedly complained in his book that “the military I loved, I fought for, I revered, spit me out.”
To start filling the gap in military leadership, Trump and Hegseth have nominated “Gen. Christopher LaNeve, Mr. Hegseth’s senior military aide, to fill the job as the Army’s second in command, overseeing the service’s daily operations.” Currently LaNeve “is serving as both the vice chief of staff and the acting chief, both of which are demanding four-star positions.”
The reporters observed that “without strong leadership, critics said that the Army risks falling behind adversaries like Russia and China, who are making rapid advances in incorporating artificial intelligence and new drones into their formations.”
LaNeve himself implicitly acknowledged that the military needs to return to learning basics as well as modernizing, with words that could be construed as applying as much to the recent military purges as to the actions of previous administrations.
“Every shortcut in training and lapse in discipline will be paid for in blood,” LaNeve wrote.
In July, former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Charles Q. Brown Jr. joined former Navy reservist and NSA staffer and attorney Andrew Kragie to warn, “When presidents use the armed forces for more politically contentious missions, such as addressing domestic crime in cities, the work of the military becomes more fraught. Resorting to a military solution rather than fixing the underlying incapacity or dysfunction in civilian institutions diverts the military from focusing on its primary combat mission."
In June, legal scholars Michael N. Schmitt and Ryan Goodman similarly raised the alarm that the Trump purges were depriving the military of invaluable expertise on a mass scale.
"Over 900 years of military experience has been lost due to Pete Hegseth's purge of 25 senior military officers….” wrote Ryan Goodman, an NYU law professor. “I highly recommend this important essay by Mike Schmitt just published."
In his Just Security essay, Schmitt (also a law professor at New York University) elaborated on the basic point that Goodman raised.
"Since January 2025," Schmitt wrote, "the Defense Department has removed, replaced, or forced the early retirement of a remarkable concentration of operationally experienced senior officers. Among them are the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the chief of naval operations, the chief of staff of the Army, and the commander of U.S. Cyber Command, who concurrently serves as director of the National Security Agency.”
He continued, “Most recently, Gen. Christopher Donahue, one of the most decorated and combat-experienced officers of his generation, has been forced out as commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa and, in his NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) role, as commander of Allied Land Command. Public explanations have been sparse and, to the extent they have been offered, largely general."
