Hegseth rejects scrutiny of Trump’s Joint Chiefs pick

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday refused to address whether the Trump administration’s choice to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is “underqualified” for the position, as concerns proliferated in Washington following last week’s firing of the military’s top officer and six other senior Pentagon leaders.

“I’m going to choose to reject your unqualified question,” Hegseth told a reporter at the Pentagon ahead of a meeting with the defense secretary’s counterpart from Saudi Arabia.

The question, posed by a reporter from the Reuters news agency, and Hegseth’s testy response reflected the tension sparked by President Donald Trump’s announcement Friday night that he had removed Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and nominated in Brown’s place a retired officer, Lt. Gen. Dan Caine, who possesses few of the qualifications detailed in U.S. law for the position.

The other senior officers who were abruptly dismissed on Friday include the head of the U.S. Navy, Adm. Lisa Franchetti; the No. 2 officer in the Air Force, Gen. James Slife; Hegseth’s senior military assistant, Lt. Gen. Jennifer Short; and the top military lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force. The head of the Coast Guard, Adm. Linda Fagan, was fired a day after Trump’s inauguration.

Retired military officers and experts on civil-military affairs have raised alarm about the firings, questioning whether Trump wants loyalists in uniform rather than nonpartisan officers. While the president is free to choose the generals he wants, they observed, the chairmanship and many other senior military positions are meant to bridge presidential administrations, providing continuity and expertise.

Democrats in Congress have said the Pentagon purge endangers national security.

Caine, a retired F-16 pilot and Special Operations commander in the National Guard, retired from the military in January and had moved on to a career in venture capitalism. Although he had a leadership role in the U.S. campaign against the Islamic State extremist group and later served as the senior military officer at the CIA, he has never been a service chief, Joint Chiefs vice chairman, or four-star general in charge of a combatant command.

U.S. law states that a president may appoint an officer to the chairmanship “only if” they have held one of those jobs, though it notes the commander in chief can waive those requirements if he determines doing so is “necessary in the national interest.”

After Hegseth’s terse response to the Reuters reporter drew attention on social media, he wrote on his official X account that Caine “is the man to meet the moment! Full stop.”

Hegseth, a former Fox News host, and his team at the Pentagon have taken an increasingly aggressive posture to outside scrutiny of their moves, launching a new rapid-response account on X over the weekend that has repeatedly attacked lawmakers and journalists who have questioned their decisions. A separate White House rapid-response account called the Reuters reporter, Idrees Ali, a “Fake News loser.” That post was shared by Hegseth with his personal account and by a political appointee at the Pentagon, the deputy press secretary Kingsley Wilson, on her official government account.

A spokesman for Hegseth, Sean Parnell, said in a post on X that the question about Caine’s qualifications was “inappropriate” and “demeaning to an extraordinary leader.”

“Dan Caine is the right man & leader for this moment & any suggestion to the contrary is just unfair,” Parnell said.

Ali referred questions to a spokesperson for Reuters. In a statement, the news organization said: “The question our reporter asked was timely and newsworthy.”

Administration officials have defended the Pentagon firings by noting that other presidents have removed generals, pointing to the dismissals of Gen. Stanley McChrystal by President Barack Obama in 2010 and Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1951 by President Harry S. Truman. In those cases, however, the presidents had proximate causes - McChrystal was fired after his staff disparaged Obama in an article published by Rolling Stone magazine, and MacArthur openly questioned Truman’s strategy during the Korean War.

The Trump administration has offered no evidence of wrongdoing by the seven senior military leaders fired Friday, saying instead that the president wants officers more aligned with his vision.

Hegseth, speaking Sunday on Fox News, said that he has “a lot of respect for CQ Brown,” calling the general an “honorable man” who was “not the right man for the moment.” Those remarks were in contrast to others Hegseth has made about Brown, whom he accused of being overly focused on diversity initiatives and had publicly mused about firing.

“Dan ‘Razin’ Caine is going to be a fantastic chairman,” Hegseth said on Fox News. “I look forward to working with him, and he will give straightforward advice, as he did to President Trump on the defeat of [the Islamic State].”

Hegseth also has defended his decision to fire the top military lawyers in the Army, Navy and Air Force, saying in his interview Sunday that the administration wants lawyers who give “sound constitutional advice and don’t exist to attempt to be roadblocks to anything.”

Asked by another reporter on Monday to explain how the fired military lawyers had presented roadblocks, Hegseth said it was “not about roadblocks to an agenda, it’s roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.”

“So ultimately, I want the best possible lawyers in each service to provide the best possible recommendations, no matter what, to lawful orders that are given,” Hegseth said. “We didn’t think those particular positions were well suited, and so we’re looking for the best. We’re opening it up to everybody to be able to be the top lawyer of those services.”