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Washington — Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia said Sunday that following a string of high-level officers exiting the military during the second Trump administration, guardrails on Pentagon firings could see bipartisan support in Congress.
The departure of some senior military officers in recent months has sparked questions about changes at the Pentagon. Retired Admiral Bill McRaven, known for commanding the raid to take out Osama bin Laden, wrote in The Atlantic last week that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s firings “raise a real risk that senior officers will be overly cautious about providing their best advice and, therefore, that the chance for military miscalculation will grow dramatically.”
“I don’t think that concern is misplaced. We’re worried about the same thing,” Kaine responded on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.”
Kaine, who is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, questioned whether Hegseth is “pushing out the truth tellers” to surround himself with “yes men.” He added that “it looks like the secretary is coming down hardest on the Army.”
“He served in the Army. He felt like he wasn’t treated well by the Army, that’s a grudge he’s carried that he’s described publicly,” Kaine said. “And so, when you see Army officers forced out, you got to wonder, is this a personal thing, or is it really what’s best for the nation?”
Among the latest high-level officers to exit the military is Gen. Chris Donahue, commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, who the Army said is set to “relinquish command” on July 2. CBS news reported last week that Donahue, who is also known for being the last American soldier on the ground in Afghanistan in 2021, had earned the ire of Hegseth and submitted his retirement papers.
Kaine said on Donahue, there are “a lot of questions and very few answers.”
“He was very well regarded in the Armed Services Committee, where I sit. Both sides of the aisle thought really highly of him,” Kaine said. “And so the news that he was being ushered out caught us all by surprise. And we don’t yet have good answers from the Pentagon.”
Kaine noted that Congress is working on the annual defense policy bill, known as the National Defense Authorization Act, which advanced out of the Armed Services Committee earlier this month. In the lower chamber, the House Armed Services Committee adopted a provision for its version of the defense policy bill that would require Pentagon leaders to inform Congress why senior military officials were fired within five days. Kaine said in the Senate’s legislation, there’s “nothing in the bill at this point that would address this situation.”
“But when we bring it up on the floor, I think by then we’ll have some of our questions answered,” Kaine said. “And if we need to go farther to put some guardrails in place, you’ll probably find bipartisan support to do that.”
Donahue’s exit sparked some pushback from across the aisle, like from GOP Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who called it “yet another unforced error from a Secretary leading the Pentagon with bro-culture bravado rather than restraint, humility and careful stewardship of the finest fighting force in the world.”
“His paranoid micromanagement of senior military leaders and promotion lists is pure insecurity dressed up as reform,” Tillis wrote on X. “He is more interested in purging people he perceives as insufficiently loyal than empowering proven patriots who can actually lead.”
