The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, stripped nine navy officers including women and Black service members from a promotion list last month, according to a person familiar with the matter, resulting in an all-male, overwhelmingly white slate of 22 advancing as nominees to become one-star admirals.
So, the biggie here:
The move has direct parallels with Hegseth’s reported interposition in a similar army promotion list in March, in which he is said to have directed the army secretary, Dan Driscoll, to remove two women and two Black officers from a nomination slate to become one-star generals.
Hegseth has previously railed against diversity and so-called “woke” in the armed services.
“For too long, we’ve promoted too many uniform leaders for the wrong reasons – based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts,” he told a keynote meeting of military commanders in Virginia in September. “The sooner we have the right people, the sooner we can advance the right policies.”
How much of this is because Hegseth is a pigdog racist shit and how much is it because he’s trying to undo the DEI pigdog racist shite of the recent past?
Hegseth, who styles himself the “secretary of war”,
I think that he is actually called that nowadays, like it’s the name of the Department innit.
Anyway One Star Admirals are Commodores and generals are Brigadier Generals.
These Graun ‘Grrr Drumpf’ articles are so tedious and half arsed.
Ah, no. The Americans have an oddity here. The one star rank is Rear Admiral (second class). O7 in the Nato listing. Commodore is reserved for that other meaning of the word, senior captain in charge of multi-ship unit – a position, a posting, but not a rank.
We Brits have the same blend, of course, we just treat it differently. You can be a commodore for the lifespan of the one convoy or operation – captain in charge of other captains. And it’s also a rank, but a rank taken only for the specific posting itself. At the end of that posting you revert back to Captain or make the jump to R-A. Same mixture of meanings of commodore, different naval solution to it.
I believe that’s no longer the case; the Royal Navy made Commodore a permanent, substantive rank in the ’90s.
(not sure why, but I think it was to reduce the number of Admirals, and hence stop the embarrassing “more admirals than ships” headlines)
That means the RN and USN have both reversed their position on Commodores; in the USN it began as a permanent rank and is now a temporary assignment; the RN went the other way.
NATO rank OF-6 is a British Commodore or a US “Rear Admiral (lower half)”, which must cause a few jokes.
(the US position is complicated; it’s gone in and out of being a permanent, substantive rank, a temporary position for senior captain in charge of multi-ship unit, an honorary designation, and not existing; it seems the Yanks have a habit of making it a permanent, substantive rank when there’s a major war on, to avoid creating lots of admirals that they won’t have use for afterwards)
Could have changed since Pops retired. He had two consecutive Commodore postings and then retired. He was more than a little miffed to find out he still only got a Captain’s pension. You’ve got to serve as a Commodore for 4 years to get the pension and he did 3y 11 months. Deliberately by the appointing office, of course.
Changed years ago. In any rank you need to do a minimum of two years to get the pension of that rank. From 1-star up all officers (regardless of service) only continue to be employed on a post by post basis. If they don’t have another job for you, you are retired.
I just looked; apparently it changed in 1997; the Navy sneaked it through in the dying days of the Major government, when no-one had a grip on anything.
Oof, that’s harsh. Especially since that was probably the time (’80s and early ’90s) when the First Sea Lords would be made Admiral of the Fleet on the morning of the day they retired.
The Americans have the same problem, more admirals than ships. One wonders when they will stop promoting and start firing.
I thought they started doing that a while ago in Iran.
In the US, no. For us a Commodore is at the same paygrade as a CAPT (O-6), not O-7. Rear Admiral (lower half – we have two RADML ranks) is a one-star.
A Commodore does get their own flag though. Its a reversed color (white background with blue decoration) and instead of a star its the eagle of a CAPT.
Commodores are a senior CAPT position commanding a squadron. For us a ship squadron is an administrative formation responsible for maintenance, manning, and training of ships and crews who are then detached to go report to combatant-command for operational orders.
Thank you gentlemen.
I think that he is actually called that nowadays, like it’s the name of the Department innit.
Technically it’s still the Department of Defense. Congress changed the old Department of War to the new name in the late 1940s. The Trump administration calls it the Dept. of War, but until Congress changes it it’s still Defense.
Two wrongs apparently DO make a (far) right after all.
This one is hilarious. They just had to include it even though it has nothing to do with Hegseth.
Hegseth couldn’t have removed her even if he wanted to.
Was Ms Fagan really a dude ?
So difficult to keep up these days.
The ReeEEEeee!!! doesn’t do logic, calendars, or facts…..
As with the story I saw on Canadian TV in 2017, about the Mexican drug mule forced by two US Border Control Officers to drink two litres of ‘soft drink’ he was carrying to prove that it was indeed, soft drink. Except it was crystal meth, and he died.
“How despicable, see, this is what Trumps USA is like” screamed the MSM.
Except it happened during Obummers second term…………
It was the same with those pictures we saw of children who’d been separated from their illegal immigrant “parents” after being caught crossing the border. Nobody cared that it was a continuation of Obama’s policy and a necessary child protection procedure.
But hey, Orange man bad.
. . . and Fagan was fired for cause. She was fired, in part at least, for her part in a cover-up of allegations of sexual abuse and assault at the Coast Guard Academy, which cover-up became public during the Biden administration and was investigated by Congress. Apparently, she had some other – shortcomings – in post as well. Why her situation has been lumped in with Hegseth’s de-selection of promotion candidates . . . oh, yes, of course. Guardian.
llater,
llamas
Where they removed because of the identified charachteristic,
or were they only on the list because of the identified charachteristic and not up to the job?
The implication is the former, but we might reasonably suspect the latter.
Of course the executive branch shouldn’t have been interfering in military promotions in the first place*, in which case Hegseth wouldn’t have needed to get involved and if he had the left could then get righteous.
*Perhaps at the very highest level where they have to work closely with the President and Secretary of State for Defence.
And yes, I am aware that POTUS is the Commander in Chief, but we wouldn’t expect KC3 or the PM to get involved either, again except for at the very highest levels.
As I understand it, the president anyway has the right to appoint anyone at O7, he just needs to get Senate approval. He doesn’t need that approval to sack anyone.
(Hegseth of course can’t do much without presidential approval – he’s really just carrying out Trump’s wishes.)
Either way, I think we’re unfortunately at the point when the executive branch needs to interfere – if the US military had focused on killing enemy forces there would be no need, but the US military, in the hands of appointees made by a previous political regime, or regimes – has been doing all sorts of weird stuff, and dressing up as women isn’t even the worst of it.
(After all, the Royal Marines have been doing this for a long while, and they remain reasonably effective as a fighting force.)
I believe it’s only the Scottish regiments dress as women.
I think our military is forgetting that they answer to civilian control – and they do so even when the civilian in control doesn’t want to do what they want to do.
Hence the firings.
And the O-7+ level is pretty darn rarified air. These are people who are setting policy and several of them have been reluctant to get on board with the new President’s policies – hence they have to go and O-6’s that don’t know how to follow orders aren’t the sort of people to allow to be promoted to O-7.
All the decent people that didn’t need DEI have already been promoted. They got preference due to their sex and race and being competent was just a bonus. Then they ran out of those so very few sex and race related promotions have actually been any good for some time now and DEI is what enables it. The problem being these are still in place and favouring people like them.
Very difficult to fix while DEI is still seen ass key.
What a fortunate mistype…