At least 20 generals, admirals and civilian defense leaders have been fired or have left the Defense Department since Pete Hegseth became defense secretary, and the turnover has now reached Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who handed in his resignation this week. Driscoll had raised concerns that generals leading Army transformation efforts were being pushed out.
The departures have become a defining feature of Hegseth's time at the Pentagon because they reach deep into the military's top ranks, including the Army, Navy and Air Force. That is why the search around Hegseth news is spiking now: the shake-up is still moving, and one of the officers closest to the Army's future planning has now left as well.
Some of the best-known names have already gone. Donald Trump abruptly fired Charles Q. Brown in February 2025, 16 months into Brown's four-year term as the top-ranking military officer, and later replaced him with Air Force Gen. Dan Caine. Hegseth said Brown was "an honorable man, not the right man for the moment," and defended the president's right to pick his adviser. Hegseth also relieved Lisa Franchetti of her duties without explanation on the same day Brown was fired, and had previously pushed out Lisa Franchetti and James Slife after Trump's announcement.
Brown had been only the second Black general to serve as chairman in the history of the military and came in with more than 3,100 flight hours. Franchetti was the first woman to be part of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the second person promoted to four-star admiral. She had been nominated in 2023 to lead naval operations after a career that included command of the 6th Fleet and U.S. Naval Forces Korea.
The pattern goes beyond the handful of names that have been publicly identified. Hegseth had long attacked military leaders as too focused on diversity initiatives, saying before his nomination that any general or admiral involved in DEI needed to go. A source familiar with promotion lists says Black and female officers have been disproportionately removed from those lists, and many of those who failed to secure promotions have left the military. The administration has also pushed out top female and Black officers, while some of those forced out left before their assignments ended and others were removed over suspected leaks to the media.
That leaves a sharp contradiction at the center of the purge. Hegseth has said officers should be able to support frontline service members, yet the ranks thinnest at the top are the very ones his critics say have been singled out most often. There are now no active four-star women generals or admirals, even though a recent CRS report says the military can have 36 four-star generals or admirals. With Driscoll gone and the list of departures already past 20, the unresolved question is not whether the reshuffling is real, but which senior officers are still on the edge of it.
