President-elect Donald Trump proudly declared on the campaign trail that if he were to win a second term, change would sweep through the Department of Defense.
His pick of Pete Hegseth signals he fully intends to carry out that campaign promise, and the most high profile casualty could be Gen. Charles Q. Brown, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
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Trump has chosen Hegseth — a former Army National Guardsman with multiple deployments overseas — to be the next Secretary of Defense, and he will come into the department, if confirmed by the Senate, with a mandate to carry out what the president-elect had touted on the campaign trail.
Both Trump and Hegseth have expressed similar views about the issues they believe are currently plaguing the Pentagon, and how they should be solved, one of the main ones being the department’s emphasis on diversity.
“The dumbest phrase on planet Earth in the military is our diversity is our strength,” Hegseth told Shawn Ryan in a podcast interview last week prior to Trump’s announcement.
“First of all, you got to fire, you know, you got to fire the chairman of joint chiefs,” he added, when asked how Trump, if elected, might “course correct” at the Pentagon. “Any general that was involved in any of the DEI s*** has to go.”
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Brown was confirmed in September 2023 for his current position, and it was Trump who nominated him to serve in his previous role as Chief of Staff of the Air Force. He was the first black military chief of staff. Trump himself praised Brown as a “Patriot and Great Leader” at the time.
In the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Brown publicly discussed how his race affected his nearly four-decade military career, which led to criticism from some conservatives.
“I’m thinking … about my own experiences, that didn’t always sing of liberty and equality,” Brown said in the aftermath of Floyd’s killing, which occurred prior to his confirmation as Air Force service chief. “I’m thinking about living in two worlds, each with their own perspective and views.”
During his 2023 Senate confirmation hearing, he was grilled on DEI in the military, in particular over an August 2022 memo he signed regarding diversity in the Air Force. Brown explained the reasoning behind the memo at the time, and in the end, only 11 Republican senators voted against him. Two of those 11 included Vice President-elect J.D. Vance and Trump’s pick for secretary of state, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL).
Trump considers ‘warrior board’
As inauguration day approaches, the president-elect is considering creating a “warrior board” of retired military leaders who would review active senior military leaders to determine whether they are “lacking in requisite leadership qualities,” according to the draft reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. The draft order indicates they will set up a review focusing on “leadership capability, strategic readiness, and commitment to military excellence,” though it did not specify how these qualities would be determined.
Brown, like every other senior military leader, serves at the pleasure of the president, and any president has the right to fire or nominate whomever they choose.
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“If the president does not have confidence in his senior admirals and generals, he does have the right to remove them, but it should not be based on issues of social justice,” Gene Moran, a national security expert, told the Washington Examiner. “These generals and admirals serve at the pleasure of the president. That’s that’s the way it is.”
“Unfortunately, the water has been tainted now with these sort of brash public comments,” Moran, a former adviser to multiple Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs in the early 2000s, added.
Brown’s spokesman, Navy Captain Jereal Dorsey, told the Washington Examiner: “The chairman along with all of the service members in our armed forces remain focused on the security and defense of our nation and will continue to do so, ensuring a smooth transition to the new administration of President-elect Trump.”
Historically, the chairman of the Joint Staff would serve two two-year terms consecutively, though Congress amended it to one four-year term in 2017. Retired Gen. Peter Pace is the only former chairman to only serve one two-year term this century, and it was because then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates decided not to recommend to then-President George W. Bush to renominate him.
Brown has served for a little over one year so far, and his term is set to extend until 2027.
If Trump were to fire Brown within the first couple months of his administration, he would end up serving the shortest tenure by any chairman of the joint staff since the position was created in the late 1940s.
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Trump had a fraught relationship with the military during his first term. He went through several defense secretaries and national security advisers, some of whom did not support his reelection bid. Many of the senior military leaders had to grapple with Trump’s views on how and when the military should be used, including domestically and against American civilians.
One of Trump’s national security advisers, John Bolton, who did not support Trump in the 2024 presidential election, said on CNN this week that creating a “political loyalty test … is not just a mistake for the incoming Trump administration,” adding that it “risks very significantly wrecking our success in keeping the military non-political.”
Trump’s mistrust stems from Milley relationship
Trump has also been highly critical of Brown’s predecessor, who served under Trump, retired Gen. Mark Milley. Milley made headlines while fiercely defending the department’s diversity initiatives to lawmakers years ago.
Some of Trump’s distrust in senior military leaders stems from Milley, whom he has accused of committing treason, in part due to his interactions with his Chinese counterpart toward the end of the Trump administration, when Trump had lost the election but was refusing to concede.
In Milley’s farewell retirement speech, he implicitly derided Trump, whom he didn’t name.
“We are unique among the world’s armies,” Milley said. “We are unique among the world’s militaries. We don’t take an oath to a country. We don’t take an oath to a tribe. We don’t take an oath to a religion. We don’t take an oath to a king, or queen, or tyrant, or dictator. We don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We don’t take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution.”
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Their back-and-forth was renewed this fall when veteran D.C. reporter Bob Woodward wrote in his book that Milley had described Trump as a “fascist to the core.”
“Woke train-wreck Mark Milley clearly suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome and it’s no surprise he pals around with a washed-up fiction writer like Bob Woodward to peddle lies and misinformation,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told Newsweek last month. “If Milley spent this much time and effort doing his job, maybe the Afghanistan debacle would have never happened.”