In last week’s article, ‘What Would a Kamala Administration Look Like?’ I put together profiles of some of the figures who are rumored to appear on Kamala’s shortlist

One of them is her potential Secretary of Defense pick.

While I’ve written about the widely-held expectation that Harris would choose a woman as Secretary of Defense, the name in circulation has changed in the last month. At first, everyone mentioned Michèle Flournoy, one of the co-founders of the Center for a New American Security and the perennial candidate to be the first female SecDef. Her name was floated in 2016 when the polls showed Hillary Clinton’s inevitability, and again in 2020 when Biden won. She didn’t get the nod either time—and for very different reasons—but when Harris ascended to the top of the ticket, Flournoy, who is also widely loved and respected, seemed a natural contender.

But now, a month later, a different narrative has emerged. Flournoy, who is the managing partner of WestExec, a consulting firm she co-founded with Blinken, is now seen as having too many potential conflicts of interest—and, as one source told me, having “made too much money”—to serve or to get through the confirmation process. Kathleen Hicks, the current deputy to the Pentagon chief, would be another natural candidate, but is seen as having had too many actual conflicts with the Biden White House. So who will it be? The name I keep hearing is Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth.

As I noted, Wormuth, who got her start as a Clinton intern, has presided over a catastrophic enrollment decline and announced that she wanted to transform military recruiting to focus on equity.

The Secretary of the Army complained that “today more than 80% of recruits come from military families. There is a risk of developing a warrior caste when only 1% of the population serves in the military.”

Instead, “the Army is strategically deploying recruiters to communities across the country based on demographics, ethnicity, race, and gender,” Wormuth had claimed. The goal was to jettison the multi-generation military families who create the “warrior caste” that she wanted to avoid.

The last thing we want is a “warrior caste”. Not when we can have a DEI Department of Defense instead.

Too many military families are Republicans anyway.