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

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This podcast is supported by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Liz Ann Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, along with their guests, analyze economic developments and bring context to conversations around stocks, fixed income, the economy and more. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

**Michael Barbaro** (0:31)
From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro.
For the past 18 months, Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth has remade the top ranks of the US military, dismissing or sidelining many whose rise, he believes, was aided by DEI, and replacing them with officers who fit his definition of merit. In the process, many argue, Hegseth is prioritizing loyalty to him and his ideas over loyalty to the military itself. Today, my colleague, Greg Jaffe, takes us inside the hiring and firing for a single job that's become a case study for Hegseth'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.

**Greg Jaffe** (1:40)
Yeah, thanks for having me.

**Michael Barbaro** (1:41)
Pleasure is all mine. So I think it's fair to say that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's desire to transform the senior ranks of the US military is pretty well established by now. So why did you decide to pursue this story?

**Greg Jaffe** (1:59)
So we knew that when Secretary Hegseth 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 diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

**Pete Hegseth** (2:31)
No more identity months, DEI offices.

**Greg Jaffe** (2:35)
And 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.

**Pete Hegseth** (2:54)
We are clearing out the debris. You might say we're ending the war on warriors.

**Greg Jaffe** (3:01)
And some of that happens in 2025 Within his first month, he fires a large number of people.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:08)
Vice Chief of Staff were all fired Friday night.

**Daryl Caudle** (3:11)
And no specific explanations were given.

**Greg Jaffe** (3:14)
It's a pretty significant purge of some of the top ranks of the military.

**Michael Barbaro** (3:17)
Right, we did a whole episode about CQ. Brown, for example, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was fired in this first wave.

**Greg Jaffe** (3:25)
Yep, but I think we really start to see it in 2026, where the firings are continuing.

**SPEAKER_7** (3:31)
Hegseth has fired more than a dozen generals and admirals since he took over as secretary.

**Greg Jaffe** (3:37)
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 had 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, admirals and generals. Huge. Yep, but in reality, it's probably higher.

**Michael Barbaro** (4:08)
So, this is about as wide-ranging a house cleaning as one can imagine.

**Greg Jaffe** (4:14)
Yeah, I've been covering the military since 1999, off and 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 Hegseth, but also to understand what it took to get hired in this Pentagon.
And that's what led us to the story of Lisa Franchetti and Daryl Caudle, hoping it would help us understand in a broad sense how Secretary Hegseth was really changing the military in ways that were really transformative.

**Michael Barbaro** (4:49)
So let's start with what you found about Lisa Franchetti, the member of that duo who was fired by Hegseth. What did you find out about her?

**Greg Jaffe** (5:00)
So Admiral Franchetti has told her story in lots of interviews about how she grew up in Rochester, New York, and she went to Northwestern University, which is not the normal path necessarily for naval officers.