Trump fires US military chief Brown in Pentagon shake-up
WASHINGTON—Donald Trump on Friday fired the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown Jr., and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of the top brass.
In a post on Truth Social, the US President said he would nominate former Lt. Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer.
Trump did not explain his decision to replace Brown, whom he thanked in his post “for his over 40 years of service to our country, including as our current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He is a fine gentleman and an outstanding leader, and I wish a great future for him and his family.”
The President will also replace the head of the US Navy, Adm. Lisa Franchetti—the first woman to lead a military service—as well as the air force vice chief of staff, the Pentagon said.
Trump earlier fired Adm. Linda Fagan, the first female commanding officer of the US Coast Guard, on his very first day in office.
Furthermore, he is removing the judge advocates general for the Army, Navy and Air Force—critical positions that ensure enforcement of military justice.
‘Politicizing our military’
Brown, the second Black officer to become the President’s top uniformed military adviser, was serving a four-year term that was supposed to end in September 2027.
A US official said Brown was relieved with immediate effect, before the Senate confirms his successor.
Democratic lawmakers condemned the shake-up by Trump, a Republican.
“Firing uniformed leaders as a type of political loyalty test, or for reasons relating to diversity and gender that have nothing to do with performance, erodes the trust and professionalism that our service members require to achieve their missions,” said Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Rep. Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat, said the firings were “un-American, unpatriotic, and dangerous for our troops and our national security.”
“This is the definition of politicizing our military,” he said.
During last year’s presidential campaign, Trump spoke of firing “woke” generals and those responsible for the troubled 2021 pullout from Afghanistan.
‘Race card’
Hours before Trump’s announcement, Brown’s X account had posted images of him meeting troops on the US border with Mexico, deployed in support of Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
A spokesperson for Brown did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had been skeptical of Brown before taking the helm of the Pentagon.
In his most recent book, Hegseth, a former Fox News personality and military veteran, asked whether Brown would have gotten the job if he were not Black.
“Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt—which on its face seems unfair to CQ. But since he has made the race card one of his biggest calling cards, it doesn’t really much matter,” he wrote in his 2024 book “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free.”
‘Not a political guy’
Before Friday night, Caine may not have been on Washington’s radar. But Trump’s fascination with the retired three-star general appears to go back to their first meeting in Iraq in 2018.
In a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2019, Trump recalled Caine—then deputy commander of a special operations task force fighting Islamic State—telling him that the militant group could be destroyed in just a week.
Since then, Trump has retold the story about how he met Caine multiple times—and the praise has only grown more effusive.
“He’s a real general, not a television general,” Trump said in Miami on Wednesday, two days before his Truth Social post.
A retired F-16 pilot, Caine will be promoted to four-star general but will have to undergo a potentially grueling Senate confirmation process.
Caine was one of the pilots tasked with protecting Washington on that fateful day of 9/11—when al-Qaida hijackers slammed commercial jets into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York City.
A senior US military official who has worked with him for more than a decade said Caine “puts the mission and troops above politics. He is not a political guy.”
But according to Trump—in his most recent retelling of their first meeting in Iraq—Caine was in the hangar where service members started putting on “Make America Great Again” hats.
“I said, ‘You’re not supposed to do that. You know that,’” Trump said in that speech last year. “They said, ‘It’s OK, sir. We don’t care.’”
