Prioritizing Loyalty Over Merit in Military Leadership Appointments

**The systematic removal of senior military officers under Secretary Pete Hegseth moves the military away from merit-based promotion and toward loyalty-based selection. By bypassing established, rigorous review boards, the Department of Defense is creating a fragile organizational structure that favors ideological alignment over operational expertise. This shift risks long-term institutional decay, as it encourages risk aversion among remaining leaders and sets a precedent for future political purges. Organizations that replace objective performance metrics with subjective loyalty tests inevitably suffer from