Need another metric to show that, for President Trump, “Make America Great Again” means regressing to a 1950s-style white patriarchy? Probably not. But here’s a good-bad one for you, marking the deplorable progress of Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s war on diversity in the leadership ranks of the nation’s military:
Hegseth’s virtually unprecedented and probably illegal blocking of promotions for high-ranking female officers in the armed services in 2026 has helped produce the lowest percentage of such nominations for women’s advancement in this century, including zero — zero — for female officers in the Navy, according to a recent data analysis by the New York Times. The brass has gotten the message.
Things aren’t any better for Black and other minority officers, men and women. This year Hegseth has vetoed at least 40 high-ranking promotions, half of them women and people of color. White men who’ve also been blocked often have been proponents of diversity. “For too long, we’ve promoted too many uniform leaders for the wrong reasons,” Hegseth lectured military leaders last year. “Based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts.”
The combination of Hegseth’s stepped-up interferencethis year in the military’s promotions process — a thoroughly meritocratic one, despite his claims to the contrary — and his purge since early last year of senior officers is rankling both the military and Congress, Republicans and Democrats, particularly for his and Trump’s evident targeting of women and minorities. But as in most things, Hegseth and his boss are undaunted.
And their white-macho warnings against “woke” are being heard from the Pentagon’s promotion selection boards all the way to America’s streets — the pipelines to military enlistment offices. Who could miss Trump and Hegseth’s message when, just after taking office, they fired Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the second Black man to chair the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to become the Navy chief?
All told since then, nearly 60% of those fired are female or Black officers, according toSen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a former Army infantry officer who is the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee. Reed accused Hegseth in a recent hearing of “hollowing out” the senior ranks “while making young officers wonder if they should continue to serve.”
Hegseth is also making would-be enlistees wonder if they should even sign up.
Retired Air Force officer Jessica Ruttenber, who flew in Iraq and Afghanistan, lamented in an online essay in May that a friend’s daughter decided against enlisting given the current climate. Ruttenber decided not to try to change the young woman’s mind, given that “we are watching hard-won progress move backward in real time.” “If I am honest,” she added, “I now find myself wondering: Would I want my own children to enter a system like this?”
The answer is crucial for a nation with an all-volunteer force and perennial recruitment worries.
Americans hardly need demographic analyses (there are plenty) to know that minority men and women have signed up to fight for their country in numbers disproportionate to their groups’ shares of the U.S. population. Or that the military ranks include more women than ever before, including in combat — a role Hegseth as Fox News pundit long opposed for them.
Suddenly, however, we have another measure of how much women and minorities (and immigrants) in the lower ranks contribute to protecting America, even as Trump and Hegseth are pushing out so many at the top who look like them: the casualty toll in Trump’s war against Iran.
Look at a gallery of the “faces of the fallen” in the Iran operation and other military deployments under Trump. (Never mind Hegseth’s complaint that the media focus on the dead because we’re trying to “make the president look bad.”) About half of the 18 service members who have died since February are women and minorities.
Two of the three service members killed last month in Jordan by an Iran drone were women of color. Sgt. Angel S. Rampersad of Queens, N.Y., 28, was born in Trinidad and defied her mother to join the Army as soon as she could. Army Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, went to a Texas recruiter even before graduating from high school just last year. “This was her chance to do everything she dreamed of — travel internationally, serve people and even learn how to use the ‘pew, pew, pew,’ and yes, those were her exact words,” her uncle said.
Army Chief Warrant Officer 3 Robert Marzan, 54, a Filipino American from Sacramento, had served more than 30 years when he was one of six service members killed in an Iran drone attack in Kuwait in March. Army Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton, 30, a father from Fayetteville, N.C., had served nearly a decade when he died in July in Iraq.
The six service members killed in March in a plane refueling crash included Air Force Capt. Ariana Savino, 31, of Covington, Wash., a proud Puerto Rican. Her family’s statement surely would make Hegseth wince: “She made it her mission to be a role model for … the next generation of youth, women, and minorities with their hearts set on a career in aviation.” Also killed in the crash was Tech Sgt. Tyler Simmons, 28, of Columbus, Ohio. His father, Charles “Mylo” Simmons, praised his son’s expertise as a refueling boom operator: “It’s not usual to see African American men in that position. Made me very proud.”
Trump famously asked about fallen troops, “What was in it for them?” He, and Hegseth, should put that question to Mylo and Cheryl Simmons. The Simmonses would tell them that their only child “was living his best life,” in her words to ABC News, in service to his country.
Not that the conversation would do any good with those two entitled white guys, both of them promoted far beyond either their merit or fitness for office.
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The post Hegseth is purging people of color. Trump’s war is killing them appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
