Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently blocked the promotions of seven senior Navy officers, five of whom are women or people of color, to two-star admiral rank, current and former defense officials said.
The highly unusual move means that for the first time in more than a decade, no female active-duty naval officers are likely to be promoted to admiral this year, officials said.
The initial list consisted of 22 officers who were chosen by a promotion board made up of senior admirals. The board determined that the two-star nominees were among the Navy’s highest performers over careers spanning more than 25 years.
Among those removed was Rear Adm. Amy Bauernschmidt, who was chosen in 2020 to be the first woman to command the crew of one of the Navy’s 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.
Mr. Hegseth did not provide a rationale for pulling Admiral Bauernschmidt or the other officers off the promotion list. But he has claimed in recent years that the military has focused too much on promoting people of color and women, at the expense of white men.
“Affirmative action promotions have skyrocketed with ‘firsts’ being the most important factor in filling new commands,” Mr. Hegseth wrote in the opening pages of his 2024 book “The War on Warriors.” “We will not stop until trans-lesbian Black females run everything!”
Mr. Hegseth’s book did not provide statistics to back up his claims. Women make up 21 percent of the active-duty Navy, but account for only about 7 percent of active-duty admirals.
Mr. Hegseth has fired or sidelined more than two dozen generals and admirals, including Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy, whom he dismissed last year. He has also removed about 40 senior officers, selected by boards made up of peers, from promotion lists.
More than half of those fired or removed by Mr. Hegseth from promotion lists have been female or Black. At least one female Navy Reserve officer was nominated for promotion to one-star rank earlier this summer.
Once nominated, the officers must be confirmed by the Senate.
In a July 6 letter, seven Senate Democrats complained that Mr. Hegseth’s moves appeared to disregard the removed officers’ achievements, and that they ran counter to “the idea of an apolitical military.”
They also appeared to violate Pentagon policy, which holds that the defense secretary is only supposed to pull officers from the list for moral, mental, physical or professional failings that raise questions about an officer’s ability to lead.
In the letter, the senators asked Mr. Hegseth for a demographic breakdown of the officers removed from promotion lists, the legal authorities he was using to strike the names, and his rationale for removing them.
The Pentagon declined to answer a series of questions about Mr. Hegseth’s decision to remove officers from promotion lists. Instead, a Pentagon spokesman accused The New York Times of having “a toxic obsession with race and identity.”
The Navy declined to comment.
Before he was nominated to lead the Pentagon, Mr. Hegseth cast the 2015 decision by the Obama administration to let women serve in ground combat units as a mistake. “It hasn’t made us more effective,” Mr. Hegseth said on a podcast in November 2024. “It hasn’t made us more lethal.”
A few months later, during Mr. Hegseth’s Senate confirmation hearing, he backed off that position, maintaining that women should be allowed to serve in ground combat units as long as they passed the same physical tests as men.
“When I am talking about that issue, it is not about the capabilities of men and women,” he said. “It is about standards.”
Last December, the Pentagon initiated a six-month review of women in ground combat units to ensure that their presence did not degrade the effectiveness of the formations. The review was reported earlier by NPR.
Most Navy combat jobs have been open to women since 1993, when Congress lifted prohibitions on women serving on combat aircraft and ships.
Admiral Bauernschmidt graduated from the Naval Academy a few months later, training first as a helicopter pilot before being selected in 2014 to attend the Navy’s nuclear power school and to enter the pipeline to command an aircraft carrier.
“That law absolutely changed my life,” she told CBS News in 2018 when she was the executive officer of the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier.
In 2022, she was in command of the ship in the Western Pacific at a tense moment in U.S.-Chinese relations. She described her position as “easily one of the most incredible jobs in the world.”
When she stepped down, there were no women in the six-year-long training pipeline that the Navy built for aspiring carrier commanders.
Admiral Bauernschmidt rose through the ranks just behind Vice Admiral Sara Joyner, who in 2011 became the first woman to lead a carrier air wing. Admiral Joyner retired last fall after Mr. Hegseth blocked an effort by the Navy secretary to nominate her to serve in a higher-profile job.
In Admiral Joyner’s case, Mr. Hegseth was put off by a Navy recruiting ad that had highlighted her childhood and rise in the service. “One day, everyone will see that I’m not just a girl with a dream,” her character in the 2021 ad said. “I’m a sailor with one.”
Across all of the services, public affairs officials have been quietly ordered to go through their units’ social media accounts and delete posts that refer to the “first woman” or “first African-American” to achieve a military milestone.
A similar effort was made on behalf of Admiral Bauernschmidt. Several senior Navy officers, including at least one four-star admiral, interceded to vouch for her competence and character.
But it was not enough to save her nomination. Some of her fellow officers who were pulled off promotion lists by Mr. Hegseth have opted to retire. Admiral Bauernschmidt has told colleagues that she plans to continue to fight for the promotion she earned, a defense official said.
As word of Admiral Bauernschmidt’s fate spread through the fleet, some current and former Navy officers reflected on how quickly opportunities for female sailors have seemed to contract in just the last year. In 1989, the Navy selected its first female officer to command a combat logistics force ship. To mark the occasion, Vice Admiral Jeremy M. Boorda, the chief of Navy personnel at the time, sent a letter to all of the Navy’s 184 female surface warfare officers.
“I look forward to the day, soon, when this will cease to be a special event,” he wrote. “We are getting there, and it is due to your efforts, your dedication and your capabilities to get the job done. I am proud of you.”
Kate Kelly and Julie Tate contributed reporting.
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