By Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – It’s hard to tell just where retired General Mark Milley’s portrait once hung in the Pentagon’s prestigious E-ring hallway, alongside all of the former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Painters on Tuesday spread a fresh coat to hide the holes that showed where it had been mounted until its sudden removal following President Donald Trump’s Monday inauguration.
“Poof! He’s gone,” one uniformed military official joked, shaking his head in bewilderment.
But the worry in the Pentagon is hardly confined to the long-running animus between Trump and Milley, who was Trump’s top military advisor between 2019 and early 2021 and had a dramatic falling out with his boss. It is about a larger shake-up of top brass that feels increasingly likely at the U.S. military’s headquarters, which during the post-9/11 era was seen as above the political fray.
The Pentagon has declined to say who gave the order.
Pete Hegseth, whose nomination to lead the Pentagon advanced on Monday past the Senate Armed Services Committee in a party-line 14-13 vote, has made no secret that he believes there are too many four-star generals and that nobody is above review.
“We won World War Two with seven four-star generals. Today we have 44 four-star generals,” Hegseth said last week. “There’s an inverse relationship between the size of staffs and victory on the battlefield.”
The firing of U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Linda Lee Fagan, the first female uniformed leader of an Armed Forces branch, echoed in the halls of the Pentagon.
While the Coast Guard is part of the armed forces, it falls under the Department of Homeland Security and not the Pentagon.
REVIEW OF MILITARY STAFF EXPECTED
Hegseth has declined to rule out firing the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General C.Q. Brown, if he takes over the military, a possibility first reported by Reuters. He said he would be carrying out a broad review.
“Every single senior officer will be reviewed based on meritocracy, standards, lethality and commitment to lawful orders they will be given,” Hegseth said at his Senate confirmation hearing last week.
Some U.S. defense officials – civilian and uniformed – hope that Trump’s review and potential staff cuts will mirror those of past administrations and will not cause disruption across the military.
When Robert Gates was defense secretary at the end of George W. Bush’s administration and the beginning of Barack Obama’s he sought to cut costs to reinvest those funds in warfighting. Gates, who bristled at costly congressionally mandated studies, ordered their price tags be published.
He scrapped production of F-22 fighter jets and shuttered the U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), which had 2,800 U.S. military and civilian staff and about 3,000 contractors. He also moved to reduce the number of generals.
But as Trump’s team is sworn into jobs across the Pentagon, there is anxiety about sweeping personnel decisions.
“People are trying to read the tea leaves about what might be coming,” a second U.S. official said. Milley’s portrait removal is not doing much to allay those concerns, officials said.
Trump’s rivalry with Milley ran deep.
At his retirement ceremony in 2023, Milley took a veiled jab at Trump, saying U.S. troops take an oath to the Constitution and not a “wannabe dictator.”
Trump later that day lashed out at him with a series of insults, calling Milley “slow moving and thinking” and a “moron.”
In the aftermath of Trump’s supporters storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Milley called China to reassure them of U.S. stability. Trump, in a social media post, described the phone call as “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.”
Some of Trump’s supporters, seeing Milley as disloyal to Trump, had wanted him called back to active duty and tried for treason.
Hegseth has also lashed out at Milley in his latest book, writing “Fuck Mark Milley too.”
As they finished painting the wall where Milley’s painting had hung for just over a week since its January unveiling, one painter looked at the blank wall with humorous satisfaction.
“There was no portrait here,” he said.
(Reporting by Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali; Editing by Don Durfee and Sandra Maler)
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