Gunning for Hegseth with as much enthusiasm as they have been lately, I suppose I should have paid attention to this ‘important’ (as it’s been duly dubbed by the chattering classes) Task & Purpose article that came out yesterday.
Over the last year the Navy has not promoted a single female officer from Captain to one-star admiral – an important read from@TaskandPurpose https://t.co/T11DWATQSd
— Tara Copp (@TaraCopp) May 27, 2026
And I didn’t simply because when I saw her Xweet, two things occurred to me:
1) Yeah, so?
2) WaPo reporter spazzing so double that ‘Yeah, so?’
But this has, not unsurprisingly, turned into a furious argument over merit versus genitalia-based promotion in the one element of our society that the majority of those commenting have little to zero lived experience, which is, oddly enough, their favourite metric for appeals to authority after all.
So, here are the opening paragraphs of the Task & Purpose story.
The Pentagon’s latest set of Navy promotions, advancing more than 20 Navy captains to one-star admiral, included zero women, reinvigorating a debate about the barriers women face in their climb to the highest rungs of the military.
Last week, the Pentagon released a list of 22 appointments by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of Navy captains to rear admiral, lower half, which are one-star flag officers at the O-7 paygrade.
Promotion from captain to admiral is the first of the flag ranks among the naval officer corps, and is the most selective for officers in the Navy.
The list released last week continued a year-long trend of women in the service not moving up to flag officer ranks. A review by Task & Purpose of Pentagon promotion lists found that the last time the Navy promoted a woman from captain to rear admiral was last June, when three women were among 15 captains given their first star. Since December 2025, 29 men have been promoted or assigned to new positions as admirals.
Now, I’m not sure what happened, but on that June 2025 flag announcement from the War Department, I counted four females being appointed to rear admiral (lower half), not three, and I double checked names with official Navy photographs to make sure they were all females:
- Navy Rear Adm. (lower half) Kristin Acquavella for appointment to the grade of rear admiral. Acquavella most recently served as commander, Naval Supply Systems Command Weapons Systems Support, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
- Navy Capt. Suzanne J.M. Krauss for appointment to the grade of rear admiral (lower half). Krauss is currently serving as commanding officer, Navy Reserve Commander Sixth Fleet Headquarters, Naples, Italy.
- Navy Capt. Kristin L. McCarthy for appointment to the grade of rear admiral (lower half). McCarthy is currently serving as director, Legal Services, Navy Reserve Office of the Judge Advocate General Headquarters, Washington Navy Yard, Washington, D.C.
- Navy Capt. Kimberly M. Sandberg for appointment to the grade of rear admiral (lower half). Sandberg is currently serving as chief of staff, Navy Reserve Naval Medical Forces Support Command, Houston, Texas.
Now, online truth brokers immediately jumped into the fray over the tenor of this posting, and I don’t blame them a bit.
What caught my eye was a scathing Infantry Dort response to the WaPo reporter’s tweet, which really wasn’t fair, as it implies she was responsible for the story. She wasn’t, although you can surely tell she was ready and willing to run with all the barbs that it flung in painting the Hegseth era Navy as one big, misogynistic boat club.
After being accused of ‘bullying’ and dispensing with the accusation, Dort proceeds in his own inimitable style to educate Ms Copp on the merits of merit, using one of the oldest examples in this country’s history – George Washington’s repeated denial of a royal commission by the British Army because he was not ‘to the manner born.’
In other words, a filthy colonial, whatever his station there, was never going to be a regular officer in the structured hierarchy of His Majesty’s service.
Bullying journalists is more American than apple pie, baseball, and driving your car with the AC on and the windows down.
What this insufferable civilization killing shrew doesn’t understand is that her words are poison to the United States military.
What she also fails to tell… https://t.co/vp8s5eeRTg
— InfantryDort (@infantrydort) May 28, 2026
…What she also fails to tell you about are all the other women across services getting promoted to flag rank. But she won’t tell you that because it’s inconvenient to her midwit narrative.
Here’s a little history lesson about why merit isn’t some abstract goal that some people like and others don’t. It is NECESSARY to preserving civilization itself.
A civilization can spend years smothering excellence under layers of ideology. Then one day the ceiling caves in all at once.
That is what @PeteHegseth understands and the DEI priesthood does not.
The people screeching about “equity” think this is just another political knife fight. Just another turn of the wheel. They think standards are social constructs and institutions are toys that can be bent around ideology forever without consequence. But history says otherwise.
George Washington spent years trying to earn a royal commission. He fought for the British. Fought and bled for them. Then built formations the British themselves respected immensely (the Virginia Militia). None of it mattered enough to penetrate the arrogance of a system that had started rewarding class and proximity over raw ability.
The empire looked at a dangerous man and saw a provincial, a mere colonist. That was
THE most expensive personnel mistake in human history….
This had me reading into the article a little deeper, and, as it’s not a long one, I quickly formed some of my own opinions of how the authors had skewed the numbers (charts for total service members here and female service member only breakout here) to serve their purposes. They are entirely wrong when you factor in how many women actually enter the service and stay around long enough to become an admiral.
Now, I’m no mathematician – I only play one here at HotAir – but I know how to find a percentage calculator online so that I don’t screw something up. And I worked out pretty quickly, doing the #mathz, that the article’s ‘6%’ is a red herring. Ignore for a later argument’s sake that there are too damn many admirals, period.
…As of March, according to Department of Defense data, the Navy had 207 admirals, of which 13, or 6%, were women. Of the Army’s 259 generals, 11% were women. In the Air Force, 13% of its 230 generals were women — numbers that do not include this month’s promotions, which moved three female Army colonels to brigadier general and four in the Air Force, while the Navy promoted only men to admiral.
This is where I went with their number. You can’t take an overall number of sailors – you have to take it proportionally by enlisted or officers. As we’re talking about officers, what is the proportion of female admirals to the number of female Naval officers, and then do the same for male officers in the Navy.
Everything you need is in those DoW charts.
When you do THAT, well…hello.
The ‘THIS ISN’T FAIR!’ argument falls apart on its face because there’s basically parity in the percentage of admirals to gender representation in the Naval officer corps.
“As of March, according to Department of Defense data, the Navy had 207 admirals, of which 13, or 6%, were women.”
But you can’t look at it that way. Male admirals (194) make up .44% of the number of males (43,393) IN the Naval officer ranks. The proportion of female admirals… https://t.co/W0PB4EDdvR
— tree hugging sister 🎃 (@WelbornBeege) May 29, 2026
…But you can’t look at it that way. Male admirals (194) make up .44% of the number of males (43,393) IN the Naval officer ranks. The proportion of female admirals (13) to female Naval officers (12,529) is not that far off at .37%. That’s near parity in the sexes if you go strictly by proportional numbers.
And when you account for the fact that far fewer females ever make a career out of the Naval service, it’s even more impressive.
This whole argument is ridiculous and can be completely blown to smithereens by #mathz even before the merit argument comes into play.
Here’s something else tricksy that the authors neglected, and I touched on briefly in my Xweet -females in the Armed Services, particularly if they enter the more rigorous combat-related specialty fields, simply do not remain in the service as long as their male counterparts do. That also contributes to the decrease in numbers.
As my dear friend Captain John Konrad expanded on my data, the attrition numbers for female surface warfare officers (SWO) in the Navy are horrific.
His quote is absolutely valid – most little girls, who might eventually enter the Navy, do not grow up dreaming of being admirals.
Now ask how many high school girls actually want to become admirals versus how many boys do.
Small sample size, but I have a daughter that age, I talk to a lot of young women at maritime colleges, and my wife is an alum.
Most boys, not all, genuinely want the career. Most… https://t.co/EBc8Vlj2E8
— John Ʌ Konrad V (@johnkonrad) May 29, 2026
…Most boys, not all, genuinely want the career. Most girls, not all, admit privately that it was their dad who wanted them to go to sea.
Most admirals will tell you they never expected to rise so high. Talk to their friends and you get a different story: they set the bar at four stars in their teens and never let themselves off the hook.
And yes, I have talked to many female admirals. They set their sights high early. I am just saying the pool of girls doing that in high school is much smaller than the pool of boys.
The women I do talk to are also far more likely to peel off the typical warfighting track into Public Affairs Officers (PAO), JAG, or Oceanography.
The Navy does not publish statistics this granular, but informed estimates put women at 40-50% of O-5 and O-6 PAOs versus single digits at the same ranks in aviation.
The pipeline math makes the rest of the point. There are roughly 40 to 50 flag billets reserved for aviation line officers. There is one for PAO.
And per GAO, female SWO retention craters to 12% by year 10. Male SWOs hold at 39%.
The women who want the four stars are out there, just not as many as the media and think tanks lead you to believe.
Now cue the comments from the delusional Naval Academy dads convinced their daughter really wants to be a line officer for the next forty years.
The Navy, contrary to what the article leads you to believe, did promote its first female four star admiral last year.
I mean, that’s a BFD! She’s black, too. Good on her.
Adm. Michelle Janine Howard became the first female four-star officer in the history of the U.S. Navy, according to a press release.
Howard, who was promoted at the Women in Military Service for America Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, is expected to relieve Adm. Mark Ferguson II as the 38th vice chief of naval operations today as well. The promotion also makes her the first African-American female officer to achieve four-star ranking in the history of the military.
But she’s also one of the few females who stuck around. Most women in the services, should they last long enough, do their twenty and punch.
They want a life, contrary to what they’ve been assured by feminists, they can have.
I left at twelve for Ebola’s* sake when they offered a buy-out during the Clinton Drawdown. I have a friend who turned down a Captain’s promotion because she had to leave her husband at his command to take hers overseas. She retired. 20 years of moving and separations were quite enough. She didn’t need the eagles.
So while the headline for this is causing all sorts of finger-pointing at the good old boys in the War Department, if one independently does the #mathz and asks the right questions, there’s actually no ‘there’ there.
Surprise, right?
The women who stick it out, God bless them, will earn their promotions if they’re worthy, just like the guys.
I realize that concept is kind of a drag for the shrieking eels, but a better Navy is definitely on the way because of it.
I voted for that.
*Our son was one of the very first computer and gaming savants in the early 90s, winning tournaments and designing “skins” for games not long after Al Gore invented the innerwebs. Unfortunately, he also had a knack for catching the first viruses. One was so virulent that it wiped his computer and all of my work and required one of his father’s computer geeks to come from base with a DoD program to finally exterminate it. His uncle Bingley nicknamed him “Ebola,” and it has been his nom-de-innerwebs ever since.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s leadership, the warrior ethos is coming back to America’s military.
Help us report on Trump and Hegseth’s successes as they make our military great again. Join HotAir VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
Read the full article here
