Pete Hegseth appears intent on sidelining women from leadership positions in the U.S. military.
President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth appear intent on diminishing the presence of women in the highest ranks of the U.S. military. Last week, they took a significant step in that direction by removing the first female superintendent of the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.
Founded in 1845, the U.S. Naval Academy did not admit its first class of women until 1976. The academy’s top leadership role—superintendent—remained exclusively male until 2024, when Vice Admiral Yvette Davids became the first woman to hold the position. Her time in the role, however, was short. Last week, the Navy reassigned Davids and replaced her with Lieutenant General Michael Borgschulte—the first Marine ever appointed to the post in the academy’s history. (Perhaps Hegseth believes Marines are more “lethal,” a term he often uses in his Pentagon praise.) Davids has been transferred to the Pentagon to serve as deputy chief of naval operations, a high-ranking but largely low-profile position.
No official reason was given for Vice Admiral Davids’ reassignment. While superintendents usually serve terms of three to five years, she was removed after just 18 months—a notably short tenure that can sometimes suggest internal issues. For what it’s worth, Navy Secretary John Phelan—who has neither served in the Navy nor has any experience in national defense—offered only perfunctory praise when announcing what was effectively her dismissal.
Trump and Hegseth have launched a wave of dismissals across the military, with a particular focus on removing women from top leadership roles. This past winter alone, the administration ousted Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to serve as Chief of Naval Operations; Admiral Linda Fagan, the first female commandant of the Coast Guard; and Lieutenant General Jennifer Short, who was serving as the senior military assistant to the Secretary of Defense—all within a matter of weeks. I spent many years teaching at the U.S. Naval War College, where I served under its first female president, Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield. In 2023, she was appointed as the U.S. military representative to the NATO Military Committee—only to be dismissed in April, reportedly in part due to a decade-old presentation she gave on Women’s Equality Day.
At this point, women have been effectively removed from all of the military’s highest-ranking positions. And the prospects for female leadership look bleak: among the roughly three dozen four-star officers currently serving in the U.S. armed forces, not a single one is a woman. None of the administration’s pending nominations for senior roles—even at the three-star level—includes a female candidate.
It’s hard not to notice a pattern emerging.
Recognizing this pattern doesn’t exactly require Columbo-level detective work. Hegseth’s hostility toward women in the military was openly expressed—by Hegseth himself—as far back as 2024. In his book The War on Warriors, he condemned what he saw as “social engineering” by the American left, writing: “While the American people had always rejected the radical-feminist so-called ‘Equal Rights Amendment,’ Team Obama could fast-track their social engineering through the military’s top-down chain of command.” (That mindset may also explain why Hegseth fired General C.Q. Brown, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the first Black man to hold the position—allegedly because Brown was too focused on advancing diversity within the armed forces.)
Not that the secretary hates women, you should understand. Some of his best friends … well, as he put it in his book last year: “It’s not that individual women can’t be courageous, ambitious, and honorable. I know many phenomenal female soldiers. The problem is that the Left needs every woman to be as successful as every man, so they’ve redefined success in a counterproductive way.”
I’m sure the more than 225,000 American women serving in uniform take comfort in knowing they’re still considered brave and capable—at least in theory. But Hegseth seems to suggest that many of these women may have advanced thanks to “massaged” fitness reports—allegedly skewed to satisfy some imagined “woke” diversity quota. And that, apparently, is the rationale behind removing the military’s highest-ranking female officers: they weren’t leaders on merit, but products of affirmative action. Thanks for your service, ladies—but let’s not forget, in Hegseth’s vision, the Pentagon’s E-Ring remains a men’s club.
Oddly, Hegseth has no problem with “social engineering” as long as it’s engineering something closer to 1955 than 2025. Indeed, he writes, the military “has always been about social engineering—forging young men (mostly) with skills, discipline, pride, and a brotherhood.” One might think that the goal is also to instill respect for one’s comrades, regardless of gender, and to defend the country and honor the Constitution, but Hegseth is more worried about what he fears is the distracting influence of women in the military. “Men and women are different,” he writes, “with men being more aggressive.” (I read this in Cliff Clavin’s voice: “Yes, Diane … hold on to your hat, too, because the very letters DNA are an acronym for the words Dames are Not Aggressive.”) Hegseth goes on: “Men act differently toward women than they do other men. Men like women and are distracted by women. They also want to impress, and protect, women.”
In other words, even after molding these modern-day Spartans with some of the finest training from the most powerful military the world has ever seen, Americans are still expected to worry that these steel-hard warriors—poised to confront any global threat—might have their “lethality” undermined by the flutter of eyelashes or the grace of their female comrades.
I was teaching senior officers—both men and women—from every branch of the armed forces while Hegseth was still in high school. His views on women in the U.S. military would hardly warrant serious attention if he weren’t, due to the negligence of the Republican-controlled Senate, currently serving as Secretary of Defense. Rather than focusing on defending the nation or securing his own communications, he seems intent on making the American military an unwelcoming place for half of the country’s population.
As Nora Bensahel, a scholar of civil-military relations at Johns Hopkins University, told me, the firing of Davids and other women “is deliberately sending a chilling message to the women who are already serving in uniform, and to girls who may be thinking about doing so, that they are not welcome—even though the military would not be able to meet its recruiting numbers without those very same women.”
Today would have been my late mother’s birthday. She enlisted in the Air Force and served during the Korean War. Coming from a poor family, she had to leave the military when her father was gravely ill. Yet she carried immense pride in her service to America’s armed forces—I vividly remember her marching proudly in uniform during hometown parades. It would break her heart—and enrage her—to see that more than half a century later, the message from the current commander-in-chief and his secretary of defense to the women of this country boils down to a sexist caution: Feel free to join the military and serve your country—but know your place.
