Published: July 15, 2026 | TrenBuzz.com
Key Points – Pete Hegseth Blocks Women From Navy Promotions
- Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blocked promotions of 7 senior Navy officers, 5 of whom are women or people of color, to two-star admiral rank
- For the first time in more than a decade, no active-duty female Navy officer is likely to be promoted to admiral in 2026
- Rear Adm. Amy Bauernschmidt, the first woman chosen to command a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, was among those blocked
- Seven Senate Democrats sent a letter to Hegseth on July 6 demanding he explain his rationale and provide demographic data
- Nearly 60% of senior officers Hegseth has fired or sidelined are female or Black, according to Sen. Jack Reed
- Hegseth simultaneously tried to push the promotion of a Navy SEAL from his own inner circle who had been passed over multiple times before
The United States Navy is heading into the second half of 2026 without a single active-duty woman being promoted to admiral. That has not happened in over ten years, and Pete Hegseth made it happen in a matter of months.
Hegseth recently blocked the promotions of seven senior Navy officers, five of whom are women or people of color, to two-star admiral rank, according to current and former defense officials. The initial promotion list had been put together by a board of senior admirals who selected 22 officers from careers spanning more than 25 years.
How Pete Hegseth Blocked Women From Military Promotions Step by Step
Among those removed was Rear Adm. Amy Bauernschmidt, who was chosen in 2020 to be the first woman to command the crew of one of the Navy’s 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. Hegseth did not provide a rationale for pulling Bauernschmidt or the other officers off the promotion list.
At the same time, Hegseth took an active role in trying to promote Capt. William Francis Jr., a Navy SEAL and a member of his own inner circle who was previously passed over for promotion several times by previous promotion boards.
As a result, the Navy is not promoting a single woman to the one-star admiral rank this year, even though women make up about one-quarter of all Navy officers and nearly one-third of the sea service’s midgrade ranks.
What makes this story more troubling than it appears on the surface is the pattern. Hegseth helped push out Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the second Black man to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and helped create a leadership team in which the chairman and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all five service chiefs and nine of the military’s 10 combatant commanders are white men.
Across all of the services, public affairs officials have been quietly ordered to go through their units’ social media accounts and delete posts that refer to the “first woman” or “first African-American” to achieve a military milestone.
Seven Democratic senators sent a letter to Hegseth on July 6 demanding a demographic breakdown of the officers removed from promotion lists, the legal authorities used to strike names, and a full rationale for the removals. The Defense Department had not responded before publication.
The Pentagon’s official line, repeated by spokesman Sean Parnell, is that “military promotions are given to those who have earned them” and that the department “will never consider the color of a service member’s skin or their gender as a factor in promotions.”
But the numbers tell a different story. Women make up 21% of the active-duty Navy but account for only about 7% of active-duty admirals. Hegseth is not leveling a playing field. He is tilting one.
Female Navy officers who spoke to the Associated Press said they now fear a hard career ceiling has been put in place above them. Bauernschmidt has told colleagues she plans to continue to fight for the promotion she earned. That fight, playing out against the most powerful military bureaucracy in the world, will be one of the defining stories of 2026.