Christopher Donahue was “one of the military’s superstars,” said Max Boot in The Washington Post. The four-star general led Delta Force, the Army’s top special-ops unit, commanded the 18th Airborne Corps, and rose to Army commander in Europe and Africa. Revered by soldiers and fellow officers, he fought ISIS in Iraq and Syria and helped Ukraine beat back the Russians. “Without a doubt,” he’s the Army’s “most experienced warfighter,” said retired Army Gen. Christopher Cavoli. But Donahue, 56, was forced last month into early retirement by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, making him the “latest casualty of the secretary’s insidious purge of the senior ranks.” Hegseth has removed at least two dozen respected admirals and generals and blocked promotions for dozens more, disproportionately targeting women and Black officers. Senior commanders can be relieved for cause, but “what’s unnerving” about these ousters is the lack of any “public explanation.”
Some of Hegseth’s “animus” toward Donahue may stem from the 2021 fall of Kabul, said Aaron MacLean in The Free Press. As 82nd Airborne commander, Donahue was the last U.S. soldier out of Afghanistan, and Hegseth has decreed that heads should roll for our chaotic departure. But blaming Donahue, who arrived to help impose order only after scenes of desperate Afghans swarming military cargo planes “shocked the world,” is “like blaming the fire department for starting the fire.” Canning Donahue defies Hegseth’s own metrics, said Mike Nelson in The Dispatch. He claims to want to rid the Army of “woke” distractions and focus on “lethality,” but is instead removing the battle-hardened commanders who have “the vision, skills, and excellence he claims are a priority.” Perhaps these warfighters are “a threat to his frail ego.”
Hegseth’s critics see an unsettling “agenda” at work, said Michael R. Gordon and Lara Seligman in The Wall Street Journal: “squeezing out officers with valor and command experience for less accomplished political loyalists.” The campaign “has unsettled military officers up and down the ranks who fear retaliation for expressing the wrong political opinion.” All Americans should be alarmed, said David French in The New York Times. The Trump administration is pushing the military to the breaking point with its failed war against Iran, potential war crimes in the Caribbean, and purge of officers. The institution can hold because its commitment to integrity, while not perfect, runs deep. But it “cannot hold forever.”
The defense secretary pushed out a ‘military superstar’
