By Jack Detsch and Paul McLeary
President Donald Trump fired Chair of the Joint Chiefs Gen. C.Q. Brown on Friday night, and said he intends to dismiss the Navy’s top admiral and the Air Force’s second in command — an unprecedented shakeup of the Pentagon’s top brass that will trigger ripple effects throughout the military.
Trump, in a Truth Social post, said he was nominating retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine to take Brown’s place. Caine is a partner at Shield Capital, a venture capital firm.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, minutes later, said in a statement that he is “requesting nominations” for replacements for Chief of Naval Operations Lisa Franchetti and Air Force Vice Chief Gen. James Slife.
The Pentagon chief also said he was also looking for new nominations for senior judicial officers — the services’ top lawyers — for the Army, Navy and Air Force.
The firings wipe away decades of military experience and could create a cascade of hasty promotions down the ranks that impact U.S. leadership across the globe.
Brown’s firing became public while he was in Texas visiting troops on the southern border, and days after he huddled with European allies at a defense leaders summit in Germany. Franchetti learned of her firing in a call from Hegseth on Friday night.
Both had been historic picks. Franchetti was the first woman to serve on the joint chiefs. Brown — who was tapped by Trump to be the Air Force’s top officer in 2020 before ascending to the military’s top job under former President Joe Biden — had been just the second Black chair.
Brown’s four-year term would have run through September 2027, although Trump has the authority to remove him. Such a decision, though, exposes a lack of confidence in the current crop of military leaders and signals to officials that they can be fired at any time.
“Well fuck,” said one defense official caught off-guard by the news.
Trump and Hegseth offered little justification for the dramatic firings. But the Pentagon chief said it was part of an effort to put in place “new leadership that will focus our military on its core mission of deterring, fighting and winning wars.”
Brown has long been a target of congressional Republicans who accused the Pentagon of prioritizing diversity and inclusion programs over the military’s fundamental tasks.
Defense officials have feared for weeks that Trump would remove Brown based on the perception he is out of step with the president on those programs. When Trump urged the Defense Department to crack down on the George Floyd protests in 2020, for example, Brown spoke publicly about the challenges of rising through the military as a Black man.
Brown appeared to briefly come back into Trump’s good graces, interacting together at the Army-Navy football game ahead of the inauguration. And on his first day at the Pentagon, Hegseth indicated he supported the military leader.
The decision to replace him with Caine is an unusual one. Pulling a former officer from retirement isn’t unprecedented. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld did the same in 2003 so Gen. Peter Schumacher could serve as Army Chief of Staff.
But a retired military officer, who like others was granted anonymity to speak frankly about a fast-moving issue, pointed out that a 3-star general has never been nominated as the chairman of the joint chiefs.
Trump also has claimed Caine donned a ‘MAGA’ hat during their 2018 meeting in Iraq, which is against military regulations.
Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker made no mention of Caine in his Friday night statement congratulating Brown for “his decades of honorable service to our nation.”
The move led to an immediate uproar from Democrats on Capitol Hill.
“Firing CQ Brown as joint chiefs chair is completely unjustified,” House Armed Services ranking member Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said in an X post. “Smart, competent leader to be replaced by a retired 3 star? More weakening of America.”
Some Democratic lawmakers ascribed a racial motive to Brown’s firing.
Brown “earned his position as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and his firing is a disgrace,” Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s top Democrat, said in an X post. “For this administration, if you are black, qualifications don’t matter … they only see people of color as DEI hires.”
But some of Trump’s allies cheered the decision they considered another step toward removing an overemphasis on diversity in the military.
“Making our military great again means destroying wokeness and firing the generals that promoted it,” Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), a Senate Armed Services Committee member, said in an X post. “We must refocus on lethality. President Trump is right to clean house!”
