Sept. 30 headline<\/a> read.\u00a0<\/p>\nSome Democrats are urging military leaders who disagree with Hegseth to stay where they are.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the challenge was \u2018get out,\u2019 then I would say to those generals, \u2018stay put,\u2019\u201d Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), an Air Force veteran, said on CNN last week. \u201cBecause we need you. We need you and your experience to counter the message of Mr. Hegseth and frankly the president himself.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hegseth also promised to continue firing top brass who did not align with his vision. And Friday, he announced the ouster of Jon Harrison, the chief of staff of the secretary of the Navy, who was an appointee during the first Trump administration.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs you have seen and the media has obsessed over, I have fired a number of senior officers since taking over,\u201d Hegseth said in his Tuesday speech. \u201cThe rationale, for me, has been straightforward: It\u2019s nearly impossible to change a culture with the same people who helped create or even benefited from that culture, even if that culture was created by a previous president and previous secretary.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carrie Lee, a senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund, said she would not be surprised to see other retirement announcements following Hegseth\u2019s pointed words.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cEven though [Bussiere\u2019s] nomination for vice chief of staff of the Air Force had been pulled and his successor had been announced \u2014 there wasn\u2019t anywhere else for him to really go, right, career-wise \u2014 but the fact that the announcement dropped kind of the night of Hegseth\u2019s speech, I think that\u2019s probably not a coincidence,\u201d Lee told The Hill.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would not be surprised to see retirements,\u201d she added. \u201cThis is already happening at the more kind of lower senior to kind of upper, mid-grade level. So thinking about colonels and one-stars and two-stars, folks who are refusing assignments, choosing to retire rather than stay in the force, making kind of very personal decisions with their families about whether this is an institution that reflects their values or not.\u201d<\/p>\n
Michael O\u2019Hanlon, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution think tank, said he doubts there will be a mass exodus, but he does sense a \u201cwidespread anxiety\u201d among those in the armed forces.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I talk to military officers, they have a range of views. Most of them don\u2019t want to pick public fights with Trump. Most of them are not at the point of considering resignation. Some of them even like certain aspects of the administration,\u201d he told The Hill. \u201cYou put it all together, there are very few people who are indifferent to these kinds of dramatic events, these kinds of changes.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added that he believes there are very few people who are getting ready to resign, \u201cbut there are a lot of people who are somewhere between nervous and anxious about where the all-volunteer force is headed, where the country is headed, and for the most part, they\u2019re just trying to roll with the punches and do their jobs as long as they\u2019re not being asked to violate the law or their oath.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lee pointed out that in declining to use his speech to focus on several pressing issues within the military, including steadily rising suicide rates among service members and persistent sexual assault rates, and instead harping on the Pentagon\u2019s process for handling complaints and accusations, Hegseth likely alienated his top leaders.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Army has been dealing with very high suicide rates. It\u2019s been dealing with a sexual assault crisis. It\u2019s been dealing with a lot of people issues. And so they have made some very necessary, in my opinion, changes to the organization and to organizational culture that it sounds like Hegseth really wants to roll back,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cFor many of the officers who are responsible for formations of troops and watched the suicide epidemic really ravage their units, and watched sexual assault tear units apart \u2026 to then be told that \u2018we don\u2019t care about that anymore,\u2019 when the Army is really a people organization, it doesn\u2019t surprise me that there\u2019s a lot of folks who aren\u2019t going to stick around for that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bussiere\u2019s retirement announcement also follows that of the Air Force\u2019s chief of staff, Gen. David Allvin, who in August said he would retire in November after serving two years of his four-year term.\u00a0Though Bussiere did not mention Hegseth\u2019s speech in his resignation note, he suggested he would find other ways to support the U.S. military after he leaves.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile I\u2019m stepping away from active duty, my commitment to service remains. I look forward to finding new ways to support our Air Force, our national defense and the incredible people who make it all possible,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth\u2019s \u201cmy way or the highway\u201d message to hundreds of generals and admirals at a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63736,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[156,111,139,69,437],"class_list":{"0":"post-63735","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-new-zealand","10":"tag-newzealand","11":"tag-nz","12":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63735\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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