The Battle to Save a Pioneering General From Pete Hegseth’s Purge
Adam Entous and Greg Jaffe The New York Times
Gen. Christopher T. Donahue greeted service members before the 2023 renaming of Fort Bragg in North Carolina. The general had extensive combat experience and strong support in the Army. (photo: Allison Joyce/Getty)
Gen. Christopher T. Donahue’s vision for fighting future wars won him powerful supporters around the world. Could they save his career?
Mr. Hegseth believed that President Trump wanted heads to roll for the deaths of 13 U.S. service members in a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. General Donahue was not responsible for security at the bombing site. But he was a top commander at the airport, and so Mr. Hegseth decided he needed to go.
It fell to Joe Kasper, Mr. Hegseth’s chief of staff, to try to convince him that he was wrong.
Mr. Kasper asked a senior Pentagon official to prepare a card with a half-dozen bullet points laying out the facts in General Donahue’s defense, current and former officials said. He took it with him in March of last year as he and Mr. Hegseth sped through traffic to the White House for a press event.
For those few minutes in the car, Mr. Kasper knew he would have his boss’s undivided attention.
Sirens were blaring. He handed Mr. Hegseth the card.
These were the facts of General Donahue’s three-decade career: He had seen more combat in his 20-plus deployments than just about any officer in the U.S. military. A star in the clandestine world of special forces, he had spent years in the shadows hunting terrorist leaders. And then as the world and warfare changed, he changed with it.
He had played a central role in the U.S. military’s efforts to help Ukraine hold off a much larger Russian force, a job that inspired his vision for a new kind of combat that married divebombing drones, robotics and artificial intelligence.
