President Trump and his defense secretary Pete Hegseth have outraged the Beltway by dismissing top generals, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Charles Q. Brown.

Also ousted were the chief of the Navy and the vice chief of the Air Force, with perhaps others on the chopping block.

This is being called an “unprecedented purge,” and a step toward the politicization of the military.

At the very least, though, these moves send a message that change is coming to an ossified Pentagon, and if they are followed up with reforms to how we promote and evaluate our generals, they will be a step toward a more effective and — to use one of Hegseth’s favorite words — lethal military.

Worries about the politicization of the military are rich after years of the civilian leadership pushing DEI on the ranks and insisting that climate change is a national security threat. Here comes Secretary Hegseth saying that the military needs to be about “its core mission of deterring, fighting and winning wars,” and he’s the dangerous ideologue?

General Brown is an honorable man, but he’s the one who used his position as a political soapbox.

After the killing of George Floyd in 2020, Brown released a video that began, “As the commander of Pacific Air Forces, and a senior leader in our Air Force, and an African American, many of you may be wondering what I’m thinking about the current events surrounding the tragic death of George Floyd.”

In all likelihood, not very many people were wondering what an Air Force general was thinking about a hot-button political and social issue, and even if they had been, Brown should have told them it wasn’t his role to pronounce on such matters. Whatever else you think about the Pacific Air Forces command, it has never been considered the conscience of the nation.

Brown also signed on to a 2022 memo that encapsulated the attitude that Hegseth, rightly, is attempting to eradicate. It set out goals for the Air Force officer applicant pool “by race, ethnicity and gender,” and ordered that the so-called commissioning sources establish “a diversity and inclusion outreach plan” for achieving these goals.

The deeper issue with our top generals is that they are the creatures of a system geared toward bureaucratic conformity and a flavorless competence; they tend to be highly replaceable cogs who know what it takes to get promoted but not what it means to be distinctive. Originality and strategic thinking are not valued, or they are even treated as liabilities. Personal peccadilloes are mercilessly punished, while minor matters, like losing wars, don’t rate.

“Relief of generals has become so rare,” Thomas Ricks wrote in an essay in The Atlantic years ago, “that a private who loses his rifle is now punished more than a general who loses his part of a war.” Ricks lamented, “a perverse incentive system that drives leaders toward a risk-averse middle.”

What we need is a new George C. Marshall, who, prior to the U.S. entry into World War II, relentlessly fired officers he found unsuitable for the impending struggle and replaced them with the most impressive talent available.

This is the real question about the Hegseth firings: Do they betoken truly fundamental change, including a rethinking of the Goldwater-Nichols Act, which created unnecessarily large headquarters staffs and generals who are good at many things, but the master of none?

Military expert John Noonan suggests a new, highly rigorous paradigm for selecting commanders based on Navy SEAL training. To wit: “Hundreds of officers apply for a school that selects only a few dozen to compete in realistic war games, problem-solving exercises, physical competitions and technical challenges, and only 10 or so are rewarded with a prized command billet.”

“War is too important to be left to the generals,” the French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau famously said. Even so, our top generals need to be better.

© 2025 by King Features Syndicate