The Military’s Senior Leadership is Being Politicized

Stars should be earned, not granted.

Trump dances at Fort Bragg in front of a crowd of cheering, uniformed service members / Credit: The White House

By Glenn Schatz

When I decided to join the Navy, the deal was pretty simple. My fellow service members and I would give up pay, family time, and sometimes our lives. In exchange, the institution promised that advancement would be earned—perform, and a board of our seniors would judge us on our records. Not politics. Not patrons. Our records.

The New York Times reported recently on how Admiral Daryl Caudle became the Navy’s top officer. Navy leadership recommended three candidates to replace the fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti. Caudle was not one of them. According to the reporting, when the list reached Secretary Hegseth, he asked, “Where’s Caudle?” Then he told his staff to talk to Tim Parlatore.

Parlatore was his personal lawyer, newly commissioned into the Navy Reserve, and he vouched for an admiral he had never met. Defense officials told the Times that Caudle had offered to help Hegseth prepare for his confirmation hearing before Hegseth was sworn in, and that a senior officer on Caudle’s staff later lobbied Hegseth’s team to give him the job. Officials called both contacts breaches of the military’s apolitical ethic. This was the same stretch in which Franchetti reportedly gathered her four-star admirals and told them to put the Navy’s integrity ahead of their ambitions. Caudle was in the room.

Then it gets worse. Before the nomination could move, Caudle had to clear a stalled inspector general investigation into remarks he made to sailors about the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response program. Sailors told the Times he compared assault victims to a man walking naked through bear country covered in honey, or wearing gold chains into a neighborhood where he might get robbed. Caudle declined to comment on the remarks.

To handle the inquiry, he hired a lawyer: Tim Parlatore. The same Parlatore who had just recommended him for the job. The same Parlatore who negotiated the Secretary’s $50,000 settlement with a woman who accused him of rape in 2017, and whose commissioning skipped White House vetting and Senate oversight. The IG found the allegations unsubstantiated. Caudle got the job. When Rep. Jason Crow asked whether Parlatore represented officers up for promotion, Parlatore wrote him a letter saying he did not. The letter left out Caudle, who Parlatore now admits was the one military client he kept.

Caudle is a fellow submariner. I have no reason to doubt he is technically proficient or even that he is qualified to be Chief of Naval Operations. The submarine force doesn’t promote people who can’t do their jobs. That is exactly why the way he got the job matters. When even qualified officers advance through back channels and the Secretary’s personal lawyer, nobody can tell the earned stars from the granted ones anymore. And the granting is now the system.

In 18 months, Hegseth has fired or sidelined more than two dozen senior officers and struck roughly 40 board-selected names from promotion lists. Nine came off the Navy’s one-star list in June alone. For the first time in more than a decade, not one active-duty woman is on track for admiral this year, in a service where women are a quarter of the officer corps. Pentagon policy says a board-selected member should only be stricken for moral, mental, physical, or professional failings. Secretary Hegseth has never even publicly attempted to do this. Every ambitious senior officer in the military is smart enough to read between the lines—that stars flow through patrons and the right attorney. A simple read of history teaches us that militaries that succumb to patronage do not stay professional for long.

I have a personal reason for alarm, too. I served as a sexual assault victim intervention advocate when I was a midshipman at the Naval Academy. I sat with midshipmen on the worst nights of their lives, as they were deciding whether or not the institution would take them seriously. As a senior leader at many different commands, I have repeatedly asked people to trust the institution we serve in these matters. That trust is the whole program. The program only works when victims trust it. Now sailors hear the future Chief of Naval Operations describe prevention in what-was-she-wearing terms, then watch the inquiry get resolved by the defense secretary’s own lawyer on the way to a fourth star. Survivors hear that loud and clear. So do parents, the ones deciding whether to let a recruiter in the door.

The Senate should refuse to confirm any name added or elevated through political intervention until it receives a written, for-cause justification for every name struck. Routine promotions should clear without delay—officers who earned their place on a board’s list should not wait a day longer because of what was done above their heads. The Senate has the tools. Individual senators have already placed targeted holds on individual nominees they believed unfit. What the Senate has not done is apply that scrutiny to the lists Secretary Hegseth altered, which keep clearing by voice vote with no questions asked.

The Armed Services Committees should require Parlatore to disclose his past and present military clients as a condition of keeping his Pentagon role, and should ask hard questions about the independence of the Caudle inquiry. And the Navy’s flag officers should reread the instruction Admiral Franchetti gave them in December 2024: The institution outranks your ambition. Some of them heard it the first time. The rest need to hear it from us. Earned rank built the most professional fighting force the world has ever known. Patronage will destroy it.

Glenn Schatz is a Naval Academy graduate, a former Navy submarine officer, a Navy Reserve commander, and Vice President of Veterans for Responsible Leadership. He served as a sexual assault victim intervention advocate at the Naval Academy. The views expressed are his own and VFRL’s, not those of the Department of Defense.