Hegseth personally intervened to strip nine approved Navy officers and four Army colonels — including two women and two Black officers — from promotion lists that senior boards had already approved, while separately trying to get his own unqualified chief of staff onto a promotion list. Three officials told the New York Times his chief of staff explicitly said Trump “would not want to stand next to a Black female officer at military events.” Under his watch, the Pentagon deleted four American war dead from its official Iran war casualty count — Trump himself kept citing the higher number publicly while the department’s own website quietly dropped it, with the excuse of a “data disruption” that never got fixed. He’s presided over a war that has already produced over 100 casualties since July alone, with Congress saying it’s received no real transparency on troop losses or equipment damage. This is a Defense Secretary managing personnel decisions by race and gender loyalty tests and managing casualty transparency by editing a webpage.