Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the Navy’s first female chief, last week without any clear explanation — part of a purge of top uniformed leadership that included the Joint Chiefs chairman, who is Black, and sent shock waves across the military.

Franchetti’s firing has left the military without a single woman in a four-star general or admiral leadership position, as women in top positions are already a rarity across the services, and many female officers say that they’re concerned that the ouster will have far-reaching consequences.

Hegseth has repeatedly touted what he calls a merit-based approach as he seeks to overhaul the military and scrub programs and policies that advocated for women, as well as for troops with minority backgrounds. But false claims that race and gender have played an outsized role in military promotions and a lack of clarity on why he actually fired Franchetti have left troops wondering whether the shake-up is more political than procedural.

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Military.com spoke with about half a dozen female officers, ranging from the midcareer level to generals, after the firing, and many of them noted that Franchetti’s credentials were fully in line with her predecessors in the chief of naval operations role. By failing to justify the firing, they argue, the Trump administration is sending a clear message: Women are no longer welcome in the military’s highest ranks.

All military officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation.

“His comments about women certainly have an impact,” one senior woman officer told Military.com on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation. “The culture he wants is going to make any woman look like she didn’t earn her position, and he probably set us back two decades.”

Franchetti’s firing was announced late Friday by Hegseth, who said he was “requesting nominations” for the Navy’s top job — effectively signaling the removal of Franchetti without explicitly saying she had been fired or offering any rationale for her ouster.

Hegseth’s brief statement was notable for what it left out.

While he acknowledged Franchetti’s “distinguished” career and thanked her for her service, he offered no explanation for why she was being replaced. That silence stands in stark contrast to his own words in a book published before his appointment as defense secretary, in which he lambasted Franchetti as unqualified, without specifics, and suggested she was elevated for political optics rather than merit.

“Naval operations being weakened won’t matter to anyone,” he wrote at the time, adding that “politics is all about optics instead of results.”

When Military.com asked Hegseth’s office on Monday for more details or a reason for Franchetti’s firing, officials refused to offer any information and instead referred questions to the Navy, despite the fact that the service itself had no hand in the decision to remove its own leader.

The contrast with the earlier firing of another top female leader couldn’t be more stark.

When the Department of Homeland Security relieved the top Coast Guard officer, Adm. Linda Fagan, just hours into President Donald Trump’s second term, officials provided a list of reasons to reporters that ranged from perceived failures to address border security and her role in the massive cover-up of sexual assault at the Coast Guard Academy to an “excessive focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies,” according to reports.

Online, the reaction to Franchetti’s firing largely consisted of sailors recalling positive interactions they had with the admiral, as well as a host of comments that remarked on the apparently political nature of her ouster.

Some prominent military influencers reacted to the firing by expressing a general sadness or thanking Franchetti for being an inspiration. Other posts didn’t specifically mention Franchetti but noted that “leadership isn’t about titles” and that “when great leaders act with integrity, those of us who served under them will carry that legacy forward, no matter what.”

Some women in the military also warned that actions like Franchetti’s ouster or reports that other top female officers were being removed from prestigious roles, like the senior military assistant to Hegseth, will have long-lasting effects on recruiting and retention.

Many of the women who spoke with Military.com noted how important it was for them to have high-achieving female role models. Some said that their own sense of how included they felt in the military would be critical in determining whether they would recommend military service to their daughters or other female relatives.

Earlier in February, retired Adm. James Stavridis, a former supreme allied commander of NATO, publicly said that he couldn’t recommend military service to his daughter today while citing Military.com’s reporting on the Trump administration removing websites dedicated to female service members.

The military’s top brass remains overwhelmingly male — not just as a result of the recent shake-ups, but as a reflection of the slow and often uphill climb for women in an institution long resistant to change. Progress at the lower ranks has not yet translated to the highest echelons, a lagging effect of promotion pipelines that stretch back decades.

The issue is especially notable in the Army, which is significantly larger than the other military branches and thus produces the most officers. The service has an overt bias in favor of combat arms officers, including those who come from infantry, armor and special operations backgrounds — jobs that opened to women only a decade ago.

“It’s going to take a long time to see if the Army senior ranks will better reflect the number of women serving,” a senior Army official told Military.com.

Meanwhile, the Army’s recruiting efforts have been largely buoyed by a consistent interest from women in enlisting as men have become increasingly ineligible for service. Male enlistments have dropped 35% in the last decade.

Despite the service’s recruiting struggles, women have continued to enlist at a steady rate of roughly 10,000 per year, on average, according to internal service data.

The reliance on women to fill the military ranks is likely to continue into the future.

Studies have shown a troubling trend in U.S. education: Boys are falling behind girls in nearly every academic category, including reading and writing. That achievement gap starts in elementary school and often widens over time. Many of the service’s recruiting woes are tied to applicants performing poorly on the military’s academic entrance exam.

By high school, boys are less likely to graduate on time compared to their female peers, and the differences are even more pronounced among male minorities. Moreover, young men have been consistently falling out of the labor market and are more likely to have criminal records, which can also make them ineligible for service.

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