Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth decided in early 2025 to spike Gen. Christopher T. Donahue’s nomination to be the top U.S. military officer in Europe.
Mr. Hegseth believed that President Trump wanted heads to roll for the deaths of 13 U.S. service members in a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. General Donahue was not responsible for security at the bombing site. But he was a top commander at the airport, and so Mr. Hegseth decided he needed to go.
It fell to Joe Kasper, Mr. Hegseth’s chief of staff, to try to convince him that he was wrong.
Mr. Kasper asked a senior Pentagon official to prepare a card with a half-dozen bullet points laying out the facts in General Donahue’s defense, current and former officials said. He took it with him in March of last year as he and Mr. Hegseth sped through traffic to the White House for a press event.
For those few minutes in the car, Mr. Kasper knew he would have his boss’s undivided attention.
Sirens were blaring. He handed Mr. Hegseth the card.
These were the facts of General Donahue’s three-decade career: He had seen more combat in his 20-plus deployments than just about any officer in the U.S. military. A star in the clandestine world of special forces, he had spent years in the shadows hunting terrorist leaders. And then as the world and warfare changed, he changed with it.
He had played a central role in the U.S. military’s efforts to help Ukraine hold off a much larger Russian force, a job that inspired his vision for a new kind of combat that married divebombing drones, robotics and artificial intelligence.
Now his fate lay in the hands of Mr. Hegseth, a former Fox News host who had two deployments as an Army officer to Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Hegseth had come to the Pentagon vowing to weed out the “small” and “feeble” generals who he believed had failed in those wars.
What played out in the 16 months after the car ride was a clash between Mr. Hegseth and General Donahue’s supporters, who viewed him as a generational talent.
That clash, and its outcome, was described to The New York Times by more than 40 people at the Pentagon, in Congress and around the world, nearly all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.
It amounts to one of the most consequential chapters in Mr. Hegseth’s campaign to drive out those he sees as out of step with his priorities, a leadership purge that his critics say is driven by ideology, identity and suspicion of those with tenuous ties to former military leaders that he does not like. And it shows the intensity of the behind-the-scenes battle to save one general.
The more General Donahue’s allies pushed, the more Mr. Hegseth’s opposition seemed to harden.
The Pentagon declined to answer questions about General Donahue, saying in a statement that all senior military leaders serve at the pleasure of the president and the defense secretary.
In the spring of 2025, General Donahue was commanding ground forces in Europe. Mr. Hegseth was new to the Pentagon. To the extent he was familiar with General Donahue, it was largely through the prism of the Afghanistan withdrawal and a grainy photo that indelibly linked the general to the war’s tragic end.
General Donahue was the last U.S. soldier to leave Afghanistan. As he stepped onto a hulking military cargo plane, an Army photographer snapped his picture using his cellphone camera and night vision device.
The green-and-black image rocketed around the world. Senior Pentagon officials said Mr. Hegseth seemed to be fixated on the photo, mistakenly referring to it as a “selfie.”
The first item on the card that Mr. Kasper handed to Mr. Hegseth in the car clarified that the photo was not a selfie and that General Donahue had nothing to do with its distribution. Other bullet points noted that Marines, not General Donahue’s paratroopers, were in charge of the gate where the suicide bombing occurred.
The defense secretary glanced at the card and passed it back to his chief of staff.
“I don’t care,” Mr. Hegseth told Mr. Kasper.
‘Brother, We Need Your Help’
At first, General Donahue wasn’t supposed to go to Afghanistan for the withdrawal. The Pentagon said it just needed roughly 2,000 of his paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division to help with security at the Kabul airport.
Then, on Aug. 16, 2021, shortly after the paratroopers started arriving, thousands of Afghans, desperate to escape Taliban insurgents, swarmed the runways, preventing planes from taking off and landing.
General Donahue’s paratroopers watched in horror as Afghan special operations units, who were waiting to be evacuated, beat back the civilians so that flights could resume.
Amid the chaos, General Donahue got new orders: Get to Kabul as fast as possible.
Three decades had passed since General Donahue graduated from West Point. He was in his mid-20s when his leadership skills and football player’s build caught the eye of a senior officer in Delta Force, the Army’s elite counterterrorism unit.
He survived the selection process and disappeared into a world of secrecy and fake personas. Deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and other hot spots followed as he rose to become Delta’s top commander.
The skill that often set General Donahue apart from his peers on those battlefields was his ability to win the trust of local partners. It had been on display in Afghanistan in May 2019 when he began leading special operations forces in the country and won over his Afghan counterpart, Brig. Gen. Sami Sadat.
Together, they leveraged airstrikes, special operations advisers and commandos to punish Taliban insurgents and retake territory that had been lost. “We didn’t feel like we cracked the code; we did crack the code,” General Sadat said.
But their battlefield gains were fleeting. In February 2020, Mr. Trump cut a deal with the Taliban to curtail U.S. military support to Afghan forces and begin the American withdrawal.
General Sadat remembered sitting by General Donahue’s side in their command post watching a drone feed as the Taliban rolled over an Afghan unit. “He was very angry, frustrated and ashamed,” General Sadat said.
Eighteen months later, the Afghan president had fled the country and the government had collapsed. General Sadat reconnected with General Donahue, who was already on his way back to Afghanistan, and told him that his Afghan forces had dissolved.
“Brother, we need your help,” General Sadat recalled telling him.
General Donahue landed in Kabul on Aug. 17.
Around 2 a.m., he met with Qari Hamdullah Mokhlis, a Taliban commander whom General Donahue’s commandos had been trying to find and kill as recently as 2020. The general’s former target was now his partner.
“You don’t like me; I don’t like you,” General Donahue’s paratroopers recalled his telling the Taliban commander. “But we’re going to have to work together.”
The biggest threat to both was the Islamic State terror group, which was determined to turn the withdrawal into a blood bath, according to U.S. intelligence. The U.S. military would control the airport and its entry gates. U.S. commanders wanted the Taliban, who had set up checkpoints outside the airport, to let American citizens and allies pass through, and keep out would-be suicide bombers.
General Donahue’s paratroopers began preparing for a major attack. They cleared the roads leading to the airport’s field hospital so they would be able to rush wounded to get care.
The intelligence identified Abbey Gate, a major airport entry point controlled by the Marines, as the most likely target. The Marines were planning to leave and turn over control of the site to General Donahue’s troops.
On Aug. 24, General Donahue visited the gate and saw thousands of desperate Afghans crowding the Marines who were trying to maintain order and screen them.
The chaos and proximity between the Afghans and the Marines made it an ideal target for a suicide bomber, General Donahue told his paratroopers.
The plan was for General Donahue’s paratroopers to take control of Abbey Gate from the Marines on Aug. 27 and shut it down. But General Donahue thought it was too risky to wait. He met with the senior U.S. commander at the airport and recommended shutting the gate immediately.
British forces, which were using the entryway to evacuate their citizens and allies, asked the Americans to keep it open. Pentagon leaders “grudgingly” agreed, a senior U.S. official recalled.
The Marines were still in control of Abbey Gate at 5:48 p.m. on Aug. 26 when the suicide bomber struck. Eleven Marines, one Navy medic and one Army soldier, along with scores of Afghans, were killed.
General Donahue could hear and feel the blast at his headquarters on the other side of the runway. “I need to know the numbers and types of casualties,” he told his staff. The situation was so dire that medics began pumping blood from healthy soldiers into the veins of the wounded.
On Aug. 30, America’s longest war came to a bitter end. General Donahue took a parting glimpse at the Kabul airport and then hurried onto the big, gray plane. It was the last one out and, in keeping with Army tradition, he was the final soldier to board. The Army photographer captured the moment at 11:46 p.m. using his iPhone and the night vision monocle attached to his helmet. When the plane landed in Qatar, General Donahue called his wife.
His paratroopers overheard the conversation.
“We’re out,” he said.
“I know,” she said.
“How did you know?” he asked.
“Everybody knows,” she said.
She sent him the photo, which was now posted on news sites around the world. General Donahue, taken aback, showed the photo to members of his team. He had spent most of his career in the shadows. Now he was everywhere.
“This is not good,” he said.
‘He Wants Fewer Generals!’
On the 2024 campaign trail, Mr. Trump blasted the Biden administration for the withdrawal and the Abbey Gate deaths, calling the episode “the most embarrassing moment in the history of the United States.” He wondered why no generals had been fired for it.
He did not mention the deal he had cut with the Taliban that set the collapse in motion.
The withdrawal first became a career-threatening problem for General Donahue in November 2024. Markwayne Mullin, then a Republican senator from Oklahoma, put a hold on his nomination to lead U.S. ground forces in Europe, effectively blocking him from taking the job.
The hold set off a scramble among senior Army officials, members of the special operations community and some of General Donahue’s supporters in Congress. Mr. Mullin, after meeting with General Donahue, relented.
For General Donahue, it would prove to be a fleeting victory. His career and vision would soon collide with Mr. Hegseth, who resigned from the Army after being singled out for tattoos that the service deemed extremist. “The military I loved, I fought for, I revered spit me out,” Mr. Hegseth wrote in a 2024 book.
Mr. Hegseth went on to blame the Army’s generals, whose ranks he believed were “bloated.” It was time, he wrote, to “clean house.”
Before he was confirmed as defense secretary, Mr. Hegseth met with Mr. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort and emerged from their talk believing the president-elect shared his vision.
“He wants fewer generals!” Mr. Hegseth told aides.
General Donahue, in his 50s and one of the military’s youngest four-star generals, seemed to be on the ascent. Three years earlier, he created a new headquarters to funnel intelligence, technology, planning and strategy to the Ukrainians.
It worked, and the Ukrainians retook large swaths of their territory. But in the years that followed, the U.S. military and its NATO partners couldn’t provide the Ukrainians with enough shells and missiles, so the undermanned Ukrainians improvised. They replaced scarce and costly shells and missiles with cheap drones.
General Donahue and like-minded military leaders were convinced that U.S. support to the Ukrainians was a worthwhile investment: It was bleeding the Russians and preparing the U.S. military for future wars.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth did not see it that way. They spoke of curtailing U.S. support and forcing Kyiv to cut a deal with Moscow.
In February 2025, Mr. Hegseth traveled to Europe. The trip began with a tense conversation with Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli, General Donahue’s boss who, as the head of European Command, led all U.S. and NATO forces on the continent. General Cavoli, who was retiring that summer, told Mr. Hegseth that he would soon need to choose his replacement.
The front-runner for the job was General Donahue, who was standing by with his troops in Poland. It was Mr. Hegseth’s last stop. The meeting — their first and only — was brief and positive.
‘Our New Model’
In Washington, Mr. Hegseth received a binder with candidates’ photos and bios. General Dan Caine, the incoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had scribbled an effusive endorsement with a black Sharpie next to General Donahue’s picture, the officials said. The two officers had worked together earlier in their careers.
Mr. Hegseth initially agreed that General Donahue would take over European Command. But Mr. Hegseth later told his staff that Mr. Trump wanted punishment for the deaths at Abbey Gate.
After Mr. Kasper’s failed attempt in the car to salvage General Donahue’s nomination, the chief of staff met General Donahue in his office.
The top job at European Command was now off the table, Mr. Kasper explained. General Donahue looked dejected. But he still had his Army post and a purpose, which he described to a former colleague.
The headquarters he established in Germany in 2022 to aid the Ukrainians should serve as “the laboratory where we test new ideas and capabilities and then rapidly share them across the force,” he said.
He saw the war as a historic opportunity, the colleague recalled. In the waning days of its defeat in Vietnam, the Army had sent a general to the Middle East to study how the outnumbered but innovative Israelis defeated Arab armies in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. That general’s report had transformed the Army.
“This should be our new model,” General Donahue told the former colleague.
He began to turn his vision into a detailed plan using a dry-erase board, officers recalled. His command would take Ukrainian advances in cheap, mass produced drones and drone interceptors, and build on them with new tactics and high-tech systems unique to the U.S. military, like precision-guided missiles, Patriot batteries and intelligence from satellites. All of this would be plugged into an artificial intelligence-enabled command and control system that would identify and track thousands of potential enemy targets in real time.
The system would then be shared across NATO to defend against Russia but could be replicated in the Pacific and elsewhere. The officers in the room initially called it “the Global Killing Machine.” Its proper name became the Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative.
He pitched the plan to Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll over beers at a bowling alley at his base in Germany, said Pentagon officials.
Mr. Driscoll was taken with it.
Gen. Randy George, the Army’s chief of staff, was going to retire in the summer of 2027. Now that the European Command job was off the table, General George, Mr. Kasper and Mr. Driscoll cooked up a new idea. General Donahue could take over for General George when he stepped down.
The Army chief of staff job would allow General Donahue to bring the vision he had sketched out in Europe to the entire force.
But Mr. Hegseth had other plans. He wanted to nominate General Christopher LaNeve, his senior military adviser, to the chief of staff post.
Mr. Driscoll had a strained relationship with Mr. Hegseth. He tried to advance his preferred candidate by arranging a meeting between Vice President JD Vance, his close friend and Yale Law School classmate, and General Donahue, officials said.
Mr. Vance might be willing to push Mr. Trump to overrule Mr. Hegseth, Mr. Driscoll reasoned.
But Mr. Hegseth learned of the meeting and blocked it, officials said.
Mr. Hegseth had set in motion a plan to reduce General Donahue’s job in Europe from a four-star to a three-star position this summer. The move was in line with the Trump administration’s policy of shifting the military’s focus from Europe to Asia. For Mr. Hegseth, it also had the benefit of forcing General Donahue to retire, if he did not get another four-star position.
In late February, the drone threat that General Donahue had been preparing for in Europe became a deadly reality for U.S. forces in the Middle East.
Mr. Trump had launched an extensive attack on Iran, and Iran responded with volleys of Shaheed drones, similar to those used by the Russians. U.S. troops were not ready.
One attack struck a U.S. Army base in Kuwait, killing six soldiers.
Overnight, the Pentagon sent frantic messages to commanders around the world, desperate for drone interceptors.
General Donahue had already distributed the command’s stock to NATO partners. But he knew someone who had more of them: Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, the commander in chief of Ukrainian forces.
They had grown close over the previous four years in frequent secure video conference calls that began with the same salutation — “my friend” or “my brother” — and ended with General Donahue saying, “What else can I do for Ukraine?” the Ukrainian general recalled.
“Afterward, he would genuinely try to do something,” General Syrskyi said.
Now the situation was reversed. The U.S. military was the one needing help. General Donahue asked General Syrskyi for drone interceptors and Ukrainian officers with experience using them in battle. They would join their Europe-based American counterparts and teach troops in the Middle East how to defend themselves.
“I called the president of Ukraine, explained the situation, and told him that I believed providing this assistance was the right thing to do and that it would not compromise Ukraine’s defense,” General Syrskyi said.
As this was happening in early March, General George called General Donahue to tell him to put in his retirement papers. Mr. Hegseth wanted him out.
General George said he would try to convince Mr. Hegseth to extend General Donahue’s command six months until December 2026. The Army chief asked for 30 minutes with Mr. Hegseth to discuss General Donahue and other issues, but Mr. Hegseth kept postponing the meeting.
On April 1, Mr. Hegseth fired General George in a phone call that lasted 15 seconds, officials said.
General George could no longer help him. There was now one last slim hope for General Donahue: his supporters in the Senate. They were frustrated by Mr. Hegseth’s lack of transparency, and they valued senior officers like General Donahue for their frank assessments.
One of General Donahue’s supporters was Senator Tim Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL and Republican of Montana. Mr. Sheehy’s combat record and pro-Trump reputation gave him extra credibility with Mr. Hegseth. He had succeeded in persuading Mr. Hegseth to drop his objections to a handful of senior officers, particularly those Mr. Sheehy had served with in combat.
But his efforts to save General Donahue were going nowhere.
In a meeting with Mr. Sheehy, General Caine explained why: The senators’ campaign was only causing Mr. Hegseth’s opposition to grow, reinforcing his perception that General Donahue was too powerful, independent and connected.
Mr. Sheehy stopped pushing.
Senator Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican who had deployed to Iraq and served 22 years in the National Guard, had been General Donahue’s most insistent champion. She continued to look for a way to help him.
She believed Mr. Hegseth had promised her that he would allow General George, a fellow Iowan, to finish his full term. And she felt betrayed when Mr. Hegseth fired him.
Now she was determined to block Mr. Hegseth’s choice to lead the Army. Instead of General LaNeve, she suggested three alternatives to the White House. Her top choice was General Donahue.
But a senior White House official told her that Mr. Hegseth would never nominate General Donahue for the job.
With less than a month left in General Donahue’s career, Ms. Ernst asked him if he would be interested in taking over the four-star command in Austin, Texas, focused on transforming the Army.
It would give him a new platform to spread the vision that he had made a reality in Europe. But he had a big concern.
“Do you honestly think Secretary Hegseth would work with me if I was there?” General Donahue asked, according to a congressional official familiar with the exchange.
“Honestly, no,” Ms. Ernst replied.
General Donahue retired on Aug. 27, surrounded by people he had fought alongside.
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