Chris Donahue

The consequences of firing all these admirals and generals is we're losing a portion, a good portion of a generation of great leadership.

General Chris Donahue.

I mean, Donahue, CQ Brown, Lisa Franchetti, um, Randy George, and others, uh, just sent off into retirement, fired essentially.

I mean, fired for, uh, not being sufficiently loyal or looking out, uh, for troops or trying to, you know, maybe they elevated or promoted a person of color, and then they lose their careers over this.

Uh, and then of course, Putin's going to look at that and say, okay, well, uh, NATO spread thin.

I think that there was, you know, the reason looking back now, why, why four-star general, um, Chris Donahue, U S army Europe and, or U S army Europe, Africa, and, um, four-star general, um, Charlie Costanza, Army Europe, Fifth Army Corps, Fifth Corps commander, were fired by Hegseth, likely because they were bringing to the attention to the administration these very things, that this conflict with Iran and on the periphery with providing everything we are to Saudi Arabia, to Israel, to Gulf Coast nations and interceptors, and then the strikes that we're conducting.

NATO has spread our ability to defend here in NATO and assist Ukraine is now spread thin.

Of course, Russia knows that.

In April, Hegseth fired General Randy George, the Army Chief of Staff, and his handpicked replacement, General Christopher Gelineau, has lost support among Republican lawmakers, who say he doesn't have enough experience.

The Journal also reported that earlier this summer, Hegseth cut short the career of four-star general Chris Donahue.

These generals join a number of leaders from across the branches of the military who were fired, pushed out, or had their promotions blocked since Hegseth took office.

To someone who doesn't follow a ton of military news, this may not seem like that big a deal.

Lara, Driscoll was one of a number of high-profile departures from the Army recently.

By one count, as many as 20 generals or other top military leaders have been pushed out or left since Hegseth took office.

General Chris Donahue resigned in July.

What is behind this sort of wave of people leaving?

And I think when you strip that out in the name of sameness or in the name of whatever it is that, that causes you to strip out those things because they're different and the Army should be all same, same, you lose the ability to run those experiments, and that goes back to, you know, kinda everything we were talking about, like you, you fall into these traps where the force stays the exact same.

You couple that on top of the fact that you get rid of a commander like CD, Chris Donahue, who was far and away seen as a guy who got it.

Like, he understood technology, he understood the effects of technology, he understood the role of like building international partners, um, and, you know, working through and with partners.

And then for him to be a-another one that was sacrificed to f- I don't wanna say to a vanity project, but I do...

Um, [chuckles] I see a lot of knife hand.

But the, um, uh...

So Tony, the, so how, what is, how is this affecting, like, morale among commanders at the lower levels? 'Cause if you, I mean, not only is he firing CD and other h- highly capable and proven leaders, they're, like, taking people off a promotion list just sort of at random, uh, based on whatever their, their, their, their skin color or their, their gender-

Yeah

This is a real insight, I think, into the way defense promotions work.

Uh, and what it's about is it's essentially about one guy called Chris Donahue, who's about, uh, uh, c- certainly according to The New York Times, they portray him as a real up-and-coming young all-star.

You know, he's about 50.

He's, um, he's apparently seen more combat than pretty much any other commander.

Um, he played a central role in helping Ukraine resist Russia, so you have people owe him a, a debt of thanks there because obviously what's happened with Ukraine since is going to...

Well, hopefully America will learn from that as well, and that would be down to people like Donahue as well, who are pushing this kind of, this kind of education.

Um, and the reason why he was, uh, that Hegseth wasn't necessarily a big fan of Chris Donahue's was because he was present when the 13 US service members got blown up by a suicide bombing at the airport when they were, uh, withdrawing from Afghanistan, the Abbey, the Ab- Abbey Gate, um, bombing.

Wasn't his fault.

And this kind of came to, I think, a more public light than it's been really discussed over the weekend.

There was a huge New York Times report about a 16 month long campaign to save General Chris Donahue and save his job.

And so let me tell you about Chris Donahue and then we can talk about if this was a good idea or not.

Chris Donahue is a four-star general who made more than 20 combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He's a former Delta Force and Delta Force commander.

He has been one of the Army's leading voices in how to modernize warfare, especially with drones, robotics, and use of AI data collection.