22 Names. Zero Women. How Did We Get Here?
I wasn’t surprised by the list. Here’s why that should concern us.
Last week, the administration announced 22 Navy captains nominated for appointment to rear admiral, lower half.
Zero were women.
I don’t know what is more concerning: the lack of women ascending into these positions, or the fact that I was not surprised by it at all.
At first glance, the math seems simple. According to the DoD’s 2024 Demographics Report, women made up 21.6 percent of the active-duty Navy. So statistically speaking, you might expect four or five women in a group of 22.
But that is not how this works.
Promotion boards do not select from the entire Navy. They select from the people who survived the pipeline.
And the pipeline has never been equal.
The Pipeline Problem
If you want to understand who makes admiral, you have to look at where they came from, not just how many women are in uniform. In the Navy, the senior operational command pipeline is heavily shaped by the unrestricted line communities: surface warfare, aviation, nuclear surface and submarine warfare, and special warfare.
These are the career fields that produce the majority of operational command experience that promotion boards look for at the flag level.
For decades, one of those pathways was completely closed to women.
Submarines.
Women were not allowed to serve on submarines until 2010 for officers, and enlisted women began entering the force in 2015, with the first earning her dolphins in 2016.
That is not ancient history. That is one career cycle ago.
Which means today’s promotion boards are still drawing from a generation shaped by that exclusion.
When women were banned from submarines, they were not just kept off boats. They were kept out of one of the Navy’s most powerful leadership pipelines.
Even today, women make up only a small fraction of the submarine force. As of late 2024, the Navy had 712 women assigned to submarines, making up just under 5 percent of a submarine force of more than 15,000.
So when promotion boards look for command experience, operational credibility, and career-shaping assignments, they are pulling from a pool that was never built equally in the first place.
Opportunity Compounds
We like to point to overall percentages and assume fairness will work itself out over time. It does not. Opportunity compounds.
Fewer career fields open meant fewer command opportunities. Fewer command opportunities meant fewer competitive records. Fewer competitive records meant fewer selections.
By the time you reach the flag level, the numbers are no longer just a reflection of who is serving today.
They are a reflection of the system that shaped who got to stay, command, and compete.
The Retention Layer
Access is only one part of the problem. Keeping people in long enough to compete is the other.
It is not enough to open doors if the system cannot keep people in the room long enough to reach senior command.
A Government Accountability Office report found that women were 28 percent more likely than men to leave the military between fiscal years 2004 and 2018.
That shows up at the top.
Admirals are not made in a four year assignment. They are made over decades of assignments, deployments, command opportunities, family decisions, mentorship, sponsorship, and retention points where the system either strengthens the pipeline or quietly drains it.
We Studied This…Then Stopped
And we knew this. That is why DACOWITS existed.
For more than 70 years, the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services gave servicewomen a formal way to tell senior defense leaders what was actually happening inside the force.
Service members spoke directly about assignments, equipment, health issues, family pressures, career barriers, and the policies that affected whether women could serve, stay, and advance.
DACOWITS studied those issues and made recommendations to the Secretary of Defense on recruitment, retention, employment, integration, well-being, and treatment of women in the Armed Forces.
That was not ideology. It was force management and readiness. It was one of the ways the military identified where the pipeline was leaking and what could be done to fix it.
Now that mechanism is gone.
Under Secretary Hegseth, DACOWITS was terminated after the Pentagon said the committee was “focused on advancing a divisive feminist agenda that hurts combat readiness.”
Some public-facing reports and advisory materials now appear harder to find or less visible than they once were.
So now we are left with the outcomes, but fewer of the tools that helped explain them.
The Current Environment
This Navy list did not arrive in a vacuum.
In March, multiple outlets reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blocked four Army colonels from a one-star promotion list: two Black men and two women. NPR later reported that two additional colonels from another service, one Black and one female, were also taken off a promotion list. Hegseth’s office denied the allegation.
No one is owed a star. No promotion list will ever be perfectly proportional.
But when the pipeline is already narrow, removing even a handful of qualified officers can erase entire categories of representation from the final slate.
At the same time, the Navy lost one of its most visible leaders.
Admiral Lisa Franchetti was not just another four-star. She was the Chief of Naval Operations, the Navy’s top uniformed officer, the first woman to lead the Navy, and the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Her removal in 2025 was more than a personnel change. It removed the most visible proof that a woman could rise through the Navy’s operational pipeline and reach the very top.
She was not the only one. Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield, the U.S. military representative to NATO, was also removed from her position. That kind of signal does not stay confined to Washington.
Promotion boards do not operate outside the environment around them. Senior officers do not manage careers outside it either. Captains hoping to become admirals can read the room as well as anyone.
So What Is the System Saying?
So when senior women at the highest levels are removed, when promotion lists in other services are reportedly altered to remove women, and when a Navy flag list follows with 22 names and zero women, the question is not whether we can prove intent from a single list.
The question is what message the system is receiving.
To be fair, this is not new.
There have been promotion lists before, under multiple administrations, that did not include women.
But that does not make it less important.
It makes it persistent.
The Question That Follows
So the issue is not only: “Why were there no women on this list?” The better question is: What system produced a pool where that outcome was possible?
Promotion boards do not create candidates. They evaluate the candidates who make it to them. And if the pipeline feeding those boards has been constrained for decades, then outcomes like this should not surprise us.
Even if they should still bother us.
Recently, someone reached out to me because his college-aged daughter had been considering military service, following in her father’s footsteps.
She decided not to pursue it. Not because she lacked the ability or the desire to serve. But because of the current environment for women in uniform.
I wanted to tell him this will pass. Those seasons change. That administrations come and go. I wanted to tell him things are getting better. But in truth, I could not.
Because the military I left in 2021 feels very different from the one we are watching today. And in some ways, it feels like we are watching hard-won progress move backward in real time.
That is the part I cannot shake. Because if I am honest, I now find myself wondering:
Would I want my own children to enter a system like this?
The Harder Question
And now the harder question has to be asked. Given the current administration’s past actions around senior military leadership and promotion lists, did political leadership interfere in this Navy process?
Or has the selection process already begun adapting to the current climate before anyone even has to say it out loud?
I am not claiming to know the answer.
But the question is legitimate.
And when a 22-person Navy flag list includes zero women, after reported removals of women and Black officers from another service’s promotion list, after the firing of the first woman to lead the Navy, and after the dismantling of the very committee that studied these barriers for more than 70 years, that question deserves scrutiny.
Not whispers or assumptions. Scrutiny
Confidence in military promotions depends on the belief that the process is professional, fair, and insulated from political pressure.
Right now, that confidence deserves a closer look.
The question deserves to be asked.
And it deserves to be investigated.
Quotas are not the way to populate the flag ranks with the most capable warfighters. The Navy's mediocre performance over the past decade or so should indicate that the system you prefer is not promoting the best leaders. Regarding women at sea, one need look no further than the fatal collision of the USS Fitzgerald in 2017. This tragedy happened in part because the OOD and CIC watch officer, both female, were not on speaking terms because of some personal spat. https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/01/14/worse-than-you-thought-inside-the-secret-fitzgerald-probe-the-navy-doesnt-want-you-to-read/
Geee. Perhaps it’s the disproportionate amount of women promoted solely based on being women that sucked at their job? The military isn’t a social experiment retard. The consequences of failure are death.