The unexplained removal of the first female head of the U.S. Naval Academy last week is the latest in a string of top military women who have either been fired or redelegated to largely invisible roles under the Trump administration.
The ousting of Vice Adm. Yvette Davids from her post as the first female superintendent of the academy in Annapolis, Md., makes her one of at least five senior female service members who have been moved out of their roles since January.
That trend, coupled with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s well-documented antipathy toward women in combat roles prior to becoming Pentagon chief, could have a chilling effect on women enlisting in the armed forces, experts say.
“It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that it’s going to weaken our military force by undermining the role of women who have become, I believe, an intrinsic part of our military capability,” said Leon Panetta, a former defense secretary in the Obama administration.
Panetta, who in 2013 announced that all combat roles would soon be open to women — a shift that eventually came in 2015 — told The Hill that the Trump administration’s removal of female leaders from the ranks, often without explanation, will have impacts on morale for female service members.
“Just to remove commanders from their positions without cause sends a clear signal that this is not about merit, it’s not about performance, it’s about the fact that they’re women. It’s the only conclusion you can come to,” he said.
Davids was not outright fired, instead moved to deputy chief of naval operations, a senior position but largely out of the public eye. But the shift was only after she had led the academy for 18 months rather than the typical three- or four-year tenure of the school’s superintendent.
Nora Bensahel, a professor of civil-military relations at Johns Hopkins University, said the fact that she was removed from the Naval Academy ”really sends a message from the Pentagon that they do not think that a woman is qualified to be in charge of educating and training the next generation of fighters.”
“This sends a terrible message to the women who are currently serving in the U.S. military, or young women and girls who are thinking about joining the U.S. military — that they are not welcome at the highest levels,” Bensahel told The Hill.
The purge of top female officers began the day President Trump was inaugurated, with Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Linda Lee Fagan fired only hours after he was sworn in. She had been in the role since June 2022 and was the first uniformed woman to lead the military branch.
At the time, officials at the Homeland Security Department, which oversees the Coast Guard, reportedly said the reasons for her firing were issues with border security and an “excessive focus” on diversity, equity and inclusion that diverted “resources and attention from operational imperatives.”
That was followed by the February ouster of Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first female chief of naval operations, and Air Force Lt. Gen. Jennifer Short, who served as the senior military assistant to the secretary of Defense. Both of those came without explanation, though Hegseth has called Franchetti, who boasted a four-decade career that included numerous command posts, a “DEI hire.”
And in April, Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield, the sole female flag officer on NATO’s Military Committee, was fired reportedly due to her long-time advocacy for DEI within the armed forces, including a Women’s Equality Day presentation she gave in 2015.
All women have now been purged from the military’s top jobs, with no female four-star officers on active duty and none in pending appointments for four- or three-star roles.
Asked about the reasoning for the firing of Franchetti, Short and Chatfield, Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson appeared to indicate there was an issue with their overall performances, even as no glaring mistakes had come to light while all three were in their previous roles.
“Under the leadership of Secretary Hegseth, the Department of Defense no longer makes personnel decisions on the basis of sex,” she said in a statement to The Hill. “Promotions, reassignments, and removals are all decided on the basis of merit and overall performance.”
While numerous male senior military officials also have been removed under the Trump administration — most notably the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. C.Q. Brown — the already few female generals and admirals make firing five “a disproportionately large number,” Bensahel said.
She added that with 18 percent of the force made up of women, the military may not hit its recruiting numbers without them.
Hegseth had made no secret of his views on female service members since last year, when in his book titled “The War on Warriors”he allowed that women have performed well in support roles in combat but “women in the infantry — women in combat on purpose — is another story.”
“Dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bikes. We need moms. But not in the military, especially in combat units,” he pointedly wrote.
And only a week before he was named as Trump’s pick for Defense secretary, Hegseth poignantly said he was “straight up just saying that we should not have women in combat roles,” while on a podcast.
“It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated,” he said on the “Shawn Ryan Show” podcast, which aired Nov. 7. “We’ve all served with women, and they’re great. But our institutions don’t have to incentivize that in places where, traditionally — not traditionally, over human history — men in those positions are more capable.”
To win confirmation as Pentagon chief, however, Hegseth publicly softened his stance to receive votes from Republican senators who expressed misgivings about his previous comments on female troops. Among them was Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army National Guard who commanded troops in Iraq and Kuwait.
At his nomination hearing, Hegseth said that he wasn’t against women in combat jobs, but seemed to suggest that standards for such roles have been lowered to meet diversity quotas — a claim that past defense officials say there’s no evidence of.
“Yes, women will have access to ground-combat roles, given the standards remain high,” Hegseth told Ernst, who later voted yes to confirm him in a narrow 51–50 vote.
Once in the building, Hegseth quickly got to work dismantling any program or effort with a whiff of DEI — an obsession in Trump’s second term. On Jan. 29, he moved to strike race and sex as considerations for military promotions, with plans for a new Pentagon task force to promote “merit-based, color-blind policies” throughout the armed forces. DEI efforts, Hegseth has claimed, are damaging to recruiting and force readiness.
In April he took an axe to a Pentagon program meant to advance women’s participation in peace building and conflict prevention, known as Women, Peace & Security (WPS), calling it a “UNITED NATIONS program pushed by feminists and left-wing activists,” and claiming that “troops HATE it.”
The program was created in part by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, then a member of the House representing South Dakota, co-sponsored by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, then a Florida senator, and signed into law by Trump in his first term.
Also this spring, Hegseth moved ahead with an effort to review and potentially overhaul combat and physical-fitness standards – viewed by some as a backdoor effort to keep women out of combat roles.
But Panetta said taking the steps to undermine the role of women in the military doesn’t make a lot of sense if Hegseth is indeed only looking to maintain a strong military, as he has claimed.
“It’s been clear that he’s been opposed to women in the military for a long time. That attitude is now impacting our military capability. I think bottom line is that it weakens our force,” Panetta said.
Women “ought to be judged, like every other military warrior, by their capability, by their ability to do the job. That’s why I felt it was important to give them that opportunity,” he added. “They had to meet the standard, they had to be able to do the job, that’s exactly what they’ve been able to do.”
