Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s move to ax the size of the U.S. military’s top ranks has triggered concerns of a political purge.
Hegseth, who on Monday directed significant cuts to the U.S. military’s senior-most positions, has already fired several top leaders with no explanation.
His latest plan could now eliminate roughly 100 generals and admirals, which he said was necessary to remove “redundant force structure” and streamline Pentagon bureaucracy.
But while it is true America’s forces are brass-heavy — with 37 four-star generals and admirals and about 816 officers with one-star and above — experts worry any move to slash those numbers will be done indiscriminately and without care for the institutional knowledge at the top that could be lost.
“We’re very concerned, especially with this administration, that this could easily turn into political testing or otherwise clearing out the ranks for political reasons,” said Greg Williams, the director of defense information at the nonprofit watchdog Project on Government Oversight.
“When a new administration comes in and makes a lot of changes, especially at the very top of the military ranks, especially for what are arguably very political reasons — are these officers ‘woke or or not?’ — that raises the concern that we’re undermining that nonpartisan tradition,” he added.
Hegseth’s plan, announced via a short, one-page memo, calls for at least a 20 percent cut to the number of active-duty four-star generals and admirals, a reduction of generals in the National Guard by at least the same amount, and eliminating the total number of generals and admirals across the force by a minimum of 10 percent.
The announcement was not surprising, given Hegseth has been outspoken about the topic. During his confirmation hearing in January, he told lawmakers that the U.S. helped win World War II with seven four-star generals while “today we have 44 four-star generals.”
“There is an inverse relationship between the size of staffs and victory on the battlefield. We do not need more bureaucracy at the top. We need more warfighters empowered at the bottom,” he told lawmakers.
Hegseth has since revised his argument via a video posted to social media announcing the memo, now noting that 17 four- and five-star generals oversaw 12 million troops during World War II. He compared that with the current force of about 2.1 million service members led by an intended 44 four-star generals and admirals.
“We’re going to shift resources from bloated headquarters elements to our warfights,” Hegseth said in the video on social platform X. “More generals and admirals does not mean more success.”
It’s not clear how fast the Pentagon plans to weed out the targeted positions, as neither Hegseth’s memo nor his remarks identify a timeline for the ordered actions. He only said that the effort would be done “expeditiously” and in two phases. The first would focus on cutting the number of active-duty four-star generals and admirals as well as the National Guard generals, followed by a second phase to eliminate the overall number of military officers with one star and above.
When The Hill asked the Pentagon for details on the process and timeline to identify and carry out the cuts, the Defense official referred questions back to Hegseth’s video but would not provide additional information.
While there are 44 four-star general officer positions in the military, as set by law, the Pentagon currently has only 37 confirmed individuals after at least five were recently removed by the Trump administration. They include Gen. Timothy Haugh, the former head of U.S. Cyber Command; Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the previous chief of staff of the Navy; Linda Adm. Linda Fagan, the ousted commandant of the Coast Guard; Gen. Charles Hamilton, the former head of Army Materiel Command; and former Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force Gen. Jim Slife.
As for the number of one-star officers and above, there are 857 authorized by law but just 816 currently in the positions.
The cuts come as the Pentagon, along with other federal agencies, face pressure to slash spending and personnel as part of a broader effort to shrink the civilian workforce, pushed by Trump and billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Hegseth also has made no secret of his desire to purge the military of any so-called woke officers. In a podcast last June, he said he believes more than a third of military officers were “actively complicit” in allowing diversity initiatives to undercut combat standards.
“We need in the future generals who will reverse them,” he told radio host Hugh Hewitt.
There have been attempts to shrink the Pentagon’s leadership structure in the past as amid a long-lasting argument about how many generals the military should have. In the past five decades, the number of generals and admirals has increased as a percentage of the total force, according to a study last year by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
But the current number is “low for the post-Cold War era and substantially lower than the number of [general and flag officers] in the 1960s-1980s, when the Armed Forces were much larger in size than they are today,” the study notes.
If the Pentagon has to reduce staff and general officers, four-star positions would be at the top of the list to cut given that it would mean reductions all the way down the line, according to Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel who is now a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.
“When you consolidate staffs you can eliminate a lot of other positions,” Cancian said.
“If a position goes from a four to a three-star, then everything below that goes down one level. The office that a four-star has is larger than the office a three-star will have. There’s a shrinkage all the way down,” he added. “It’s not just replacing one person, there’s a whole organization, a whole pyramid that changes.”
But he pointed out that Hegseth’s argument that there is bloat at the top of the military compared to the past doesn’t hold up when you look at the costs.
“If you look at the dollars that generals oversee, that has not changed from WWII to today,” he said. “Generals command fewer people but forces are much more capital intensive, the operations are much more intensive, and there’s more civilians too. You put all that together, there is no bloat, it’s about the same.”
Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member Jack Reed (D-R.I.) has been the most pointed in his questioning of Hegseth’s reasoning for the cuts, warning that removing senior officers without “sound justification” could hamper the military.
“I have always advocated for efficiency at the Department of Defense, but tough personnel decisions should be based on facts and analysis, not arbitrary percentages,” Reed said in a statement Monday.
“Secretary Hegseth has shown an eagerness to dismiss military leaders without cause, and I will be skeptical of the rationale for these plans until he explains them before the Armed Services Committee,” he added.
And House Armed Services Committee member Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), a former Marine, said Hegseth is “creating a formal framework to fire all the generals who disagree with him and the president,” The Associated Press reported.
“He wrote a book about it. He wants to politicize the military,” Moulton added. “So it’s hard to see these cuts in any other context.”
Lawmakers can potentially upend Hegseth’s plans as the number of general officer positions in the military is set by law and would need to be changed by Congress. Senate and House members could also insert language into the annual defense authorization budget to stop the administration from cutting specific positions.
