Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth short-circuited a merit-based process for  promoting senior officers and instead relied on newly invented criteria that disproportionately removed from advancement women and people of color who had already been approved for promotion, according to three military officials.

MS NOW spoke exclusively to a senior official with in-depth knowledge of flag and general officer selection and assignment who described in detail for the first time how, he says, the results of internet searches were used by Hegseth’s office to withhold promotions from women and people of color. He was granted anonymity for fear of retaliation.

The senior official also described how Hegseth intentionally scuttled the promotions of senior officers who perceived to support DEI initiatives, played a role in implementing the Pentagon’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, were involved in the evacuation from Afghanistan, or had a connection to former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark A. Milley, who served as President Trump’s senior military officer but after retirement publicly criticized Trump’s leadership.

“I was like ‘you gotta be kidding me’, but of course we need people to get confirmed. We need nominations to go through. We need decisions made,” the senior official said.

The senior official’s account of the application of new criteria was confirmed by two of the officers who were selected for promotion by a rigorous merit-based process to a flag or general officer rank, but then withheld by Hegseth’s office. Those officers were told by Pentagon officials over the phone their promotions were being withheld, but were not given a chance to respond, they said. For most, not getting promoted will end their military careers. If these officers do not promote to the rank they were selected for within 18 months, most will be forced to retire. The result has been a precipitous loss of experience and talent at the top ranks, the official said.

The senior official described to MS NOW how Hegseth’s executive office led a planned and deliberate process that involved creating paper-only files filled with printouts from internet searches that were inaccessible to the officers under consideration. Hegseth’s office gave instructions about the new criteria over the phone instead of in writing.

That meant brushing aside highly decorated officers with decades of experience leading carrier strike groups, thousands of flight hours on dozens of different aircraft, multiple joint assignments inside the Pentagon and shore and sea duty locations around the world. Some had multiple advanced degrees from schools like MIT and Johns Hopkins, and others had deployed in support of several conflicts like the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and Operation Inherent Resolve against ISIS.

But those same officers had findings from the internet searches that disqualified them based on Hegseth’s criteria. The senior official described to MS NOW what was in the paper files for more than a dozen of the senior officers whose promotions were withheld. Some of the findings put into the paper-only files included officers who allowed a celebration that included rainbow flags, a Pride Month event and stood up a diversity committee and task force on the USS Kearsarge to combat discrimination.

Other examples among the officers included: served as a diversity liaison officer early in their career, disciplined an officer in their command who refused to take the COVID-19 vaccine, spoke at a National Hispanic American Heritage Month celebration aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, participated in a Minority Aviation Panel at the Naval Academy, spoke about the importance of taking Covid-19 vaccines, participated in AFRICOM’s International Women’s Day panel, made a statement about being a “champion for inclusion”, participated in a discussion with the African American Employee Resource Group, took a photo with the command triad after their second COVID-19 vaccination on the USS Carl Vinson, made statements encouraging sailors to get COVID-19 vaccines, wrote an article about diversity in a publication, and was quoted in an article talking about the importance of diversity.

The way that Hegseth’s office intervened may have also broken the law, said the three senior officials. Cody Harnish, military defense attorney and former Army judge advocate general, said the way that officers were pulled from the promotion list after being selected “is illegal.”

By law, Harnish said, the secretary of defense can only remove names from promotion lists below the one-star level. A secretary of defense can only delay or withhold a promotion for specific reasons, such as being professionally unqualified, failing “exemplary conduct” standards, pending charges or substantiated adverse information. According to the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act governing military promotions, the officer facing a delayed promotion gets written notice and a chance to respond.

“If ‘professionally unqualified’ can mean ‘executed a lawful program the current Secretary opposes,’ the promotion system and law has no function left,” Harnish said.

Since President Donald Trump named him to lead the Pentagon, Hegseth has made it his mission to slash the ranks of general and flag officers in the United States military, a goal he says removes redundancy and streamlines leadership. In September, he announced he wants to eliminate 20% of the most senior military ranks — general and flag officers. There are more than 800 active-duty generals and admirals.

In a speech to high-ranking officers from around the world at Marines Corps Base Quantico in September 2025, Hegseth said the military under his leadership is  “color-blind, gender-neutral, and merit-based.”

“Real toxic leadership is endangering subordinates with low standards. Real toxic leadership is promoting people based on immutable characteristics or quotas instead of based on merit,” he said.

Asked about the changes Hegseth made to the promotion process, chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a statement to MS NOW that Hegseth is “reviving the warrior ethos” and wants to ensure the most senior military officers “are committed to warfighting, lethality, and dominance in combat.”

Parnell did not respond to questions about the allegations that Hegseth’s intervention broke the law governing military promotions.

“Military officers serve at the pleasure of the President and the Secretary, and the Department is committed to ensuring that all advancement is merit-based so that only the best and most qualified gain the privilege of leading our Warfighters in advancing the National Defense Strategy,” Parnell said.

“The Secretary has acted and will continue to act within his authority and will not retreat from the historic transformation he has undertaken,” Parnell said.

To the senior official, however, Hegseth’s added criteria — which came after the officers were selected for promotion — was a dramatic circumvention of the merit-based process that had been in place for decades.

Typically, a promotion process for one and two star admirals and generals requires a board of at least five officers more senior in rank and of the same branch as those being considered. The requirements for the board are codified into law and board members operate under strict rules against external influence.

Prior to a board convening, the service branch secretary will put out an order known as a precept that outlines how board members should make their determinations. The guidance usually includes specific types of jobs with a priority on joint or inter-agency experience, education, sustained superior performance in evaluations by more senior officers, functional expertise like acquisition or logistics, and time in certain priority geographic areas of the world.

The board can only consider officers who have spent a certain amount of time in the previous rank. Every board member would give an applicant a score after their application package is briefed to the board and then the average of those scores is put up on what is called a “scattergram.” Once all the points on the chart are plotted the board president will draw a line based on how many officers need to be selected and then look at whoever is above that line in a second round.

The previous process “was totally based on merit,” the senior official said. “As soon as you introduce anything else in here…now you get away from merit.”

Once the board makes their selections, they send their report to the service branch secretary who reviews it to ensure the rules have been followed and then passes the list on to the secretary of defense and then the president. Finally, the Senate Armed Services Committee must vote on all flag and general officer promotions. Promotions for three and four star admirals and generals are done by a nomination process and not a board because the candidate pool is much smaller.

“Federal law states that the selection board process lives with the respective service secretaries and outlines the composition of these boards,” wrote Sens. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, and Cory Booker, D-N.J., in a July 15 letter to the DOD Inspector General Platte B. Moring III after the New York Times reported on Hegseth’s blocking of promotions. An intervention by the secretary is “highly irregular,” they wrote. ”Secretary Hegseth’s alleged use of his personal views and perceptions on race and gender to interfere with the promotion process completely nullifies the extensive, competitive, rigorous, and merit-based vetting process of candidates that the selection boards put forward,” the senators wrote.

The only person who can remove a name from a list of selected one and two star officers is the president. The secretary of defense can either approve or disapprove of the entire list, but cannot meddle with individual names. But the senior official said that in Hegseth’s Department of Defense, that is not what was happening.

That senior official said the people involved in conducting internet searches were instructed to print out the search results and put those pages in a folder that was separate from the selection board’s official file.  He said of the 31 officers who were selected in a one star board, approximately 15 ended up with reports and 9 of those were withheld from promotion.  The senior official said that all of the women and minorities, except one, who were initially selected by the promotion board were removed by Hegseth’s office.

He said this was the most names withheld from promotion in the Navy’s history. The last time a group of officers were withheld after being selected was in 2016, when six officers were struck from the list because of their potential ties to the Fat Leonard scandal, one of the military’s biggest bribery and corruption cases.

The board for officer promotion to two stars had similar results, the senior official said. Seven selected officers were withheld. The only woman who was selected was removed and every person of color who was selected was also taken off the list.

All of the officers withheld from the one and two star boards had reports that were written about them. The official said he fears it could take a decade or more to undo the damage that has been done by the way these promotion processes have been changed and that this could have an impact on whether or not senior officers of color and women choose to stay in the military.

The firing and withholding of promotions for dozens of senior military officers created a domino effect, the senior official said, and many military jobs have been left unfilled for months and the deputies to those positions, who are less experienced and don’t necessarily have the right skill set for the jobs, are strained by the added workload.

“When you take a step back and look at it you go, ‘Is that what we want?’ We don’t want second class citizens right? We want everybody to think they can succeed and do their best and to shoot for the stars,” the senior official said about the withholding of women and people of color from the military’s top jobs.

“But if you have such a huge portion of our folks who are minorities and now they’re like yeah ‘I’m never going to get there’. Then what are you going to get out of that?”

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