J.D. Vance’s man in the Pentagon is a rare Trump appointee who commands bipartisan respect and affection. Naturally, this doesn’t sit well with his boss, Pete Hegseth, who doesn’t.

Julia Ioffe

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Last month, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth summoned two men into his office at the Pentagon: Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll and General Randy George, the Army chief of staff. After a tumultuous nine months of axing generals and admirals from across the armed forces, Hegseth had yet another burning personnel decision that he wanted the men to implement: Push out General James Mingus, the current vice chief of the army, and replace him with Hegseth’s own trusted advisor, Lt. Gen. Christopher LaNeve.

Maybe this was an inevitable part of the Trump Pentagon purge. During the Commander-in-Chief Inaugural Ball, the president had hailed LaNeve as straight from “central casting,” adding, “If I’m doing a movie, I pick him to play my lead.” For his part, Mingus was widely respected, had more stars than LaNeve, and had been in the job for less than two years. But he was tainted in the eyes of the administration for having served under former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley as the J3 (director of operations for the Joint Chiefs). Worse, he was seen as one of Milley’s protégés.