Pete Hegseth Fires Chief Of US Naval Operations

The New York Times reports:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Friday that he was firing Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first female officer to rise to the Navy’s top job of chief of naval operations, and would be looking for her replacement. Mr. Hegseth said in his statement that he would also replace Gen. James C. Slife, the Air Force’s vice chief of staff, as well as the top uniformed lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force.

Admiral Franchetti received her commission in 1985 through the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps program at Northwestern University, just seven years after the Navy ended its prohibition on women serving on ships at sea. She spent roughly half of her 40-year career at sea, rising to command the destroyer U.S.S. Ross, and later a destroyer squadron, two aircraft carrier strike groups, all naval forces in Korea and the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean Sea.

The firing of a service chief such as Admiral Franchetti is vanishingly rare, though Mr. Trump fired another four-star female admiral less than 24 hours after his second inauguration. That was Adm. Linda L. Fagan, who as commandant of the Coast Guard shattered a glass ceiling to become the first woman to lead a branch of the armed forces.

Read the full article. Hegseth had previously attacked Franchetti as being among the US military’s top officers responsible for “woke” policies on diversity.