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On the evening of January 20, 2025, Donald Trump’s first stop on the party circuit was the Commander-in-Chief Inaugural Ball. The Marine Corps band played, the troops were honored, Trump and J.D. Vance cut a cake with ceremonial sabers. Trump even did a little shimmy to his perennial favorite, “Y.M.C.A.” It was more or less standard fare, until Lieutenant General Christopher LaNeve called in from Camp Humphreys, 40 miles south of Seoul, where he commanded the 8th Army.

LaNeve congratulated Trump on his “victory,” adding, “Welcome back, Mr. President!” When Trump asked him, in front of a cheering crowd, what it was like serving so close to Kim Jong Un, LaNeve declared, “Every day, we train, stay hard, and we plan for anything you could possibly need us to do.” He invited Trump to come visit his “warfighters.” Clearly tickled, Trump turned to the crowd and gave LaNeve his top compliment: “Is this man central casting or what?” After some more banter with an increasingly giddy LaNeve, Trump asked the troops if they had anything to add. LaNeve pumped his fist in the air and said, “Hooah, sir!” further delighting the president.

The exchange made many people in the Pentagon queasy: Why was a general officer being so obviously sycophantic and overtly political? “A lot of antennae went up during the call-in,” one retired Army general told me, describing it as “dripping with enthusiasm” and “highly irregular.” Said a former Trump defense official, “It was totally inappropriate.”

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Yet it was this moment, people in and around the Pentagon now believe, that turbocharged LaNeve’s career amid Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s rolling purge. Two months after the ball, Hegseth plucked LaNeve from his post in South Korea and made him his senior military advisor, replacing Lt. Gen. Jennifer Short, whom the SecDef had fired. Six months later, in October, Hegseth made LaNeve vice chief of staff of the Army after firing Gen. James Mingus. The promotion came with a fourth star for LaNeve. The Senate had barely had a chance to confirm LaNeve to Mingus’s former post, in February, when he was suddenly promoted again earlier this month. He is now acting chief of staff of the Army, after Hegseth sacked the popular Gen. Randy George from that position.

Members of the military community were already infuriated when Hegseth fired the widely beloved and respected George, who’d worked his way up to a four-star from private—rather than from West Point—and was known, as a former Trump defense official put it, as “a soldier’s general.” But it rankled even more when Hegseth replaced him with LaNeve, who’s now known primarily for the Commander-in-Chief Ball call-in. “The idea that he’s going to replace George [with LaNeve] indicates to most that, well, it paid off for him!” the former Trump defense official said. “Replacing someone who was fired for no reason, and this guy was promoted after making his politics clear. Tell me I’m wrong!”

LaNeve is now squarely in line to potentially succeed Gen. Dan Caine when his term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff runs out in less than 18 months. It’s been a remarkable rise for the subdued and soft-spoken LaNeve, who lacks the commanding presence of some of his peers and predecessors. More importantly, he doesn’t have a reputation as a warrior-scholar or a big-ideas guy—unwritten requirements for an ambitious general officer. Instead, colleagues have described him to me as “fine,” “fine, not great,” “white-bread,” “not too much of a rockstar,” and “unremarkable.” The Commander-in-Chief Ball remains the first thing that everyone mentions about him in conversation. “That’s the only explanation,” a Pentagon official told me. “He wasn’t a known quantity. He was just some guy. It does raise a lot of questions as to why SecWar or the president would choose him. And this is the only thing people can point to.”

When I reached out to the Pentagon for comment, Maj. Peter Sulzona, a spokesman for LaNeve, contested this narrative. “Gen. LaNeve is doing the job that he has been asked to do,” Sulzona said. “The politics aside, he’s here to support the initiatives that the Army has put in place and what he thinks about first thing every day is, Is this something that will support soldiers in doing their mission and in their livelihood? This is an individual who is 100 percent committed to serving the Army and the Constitution of the U.S. and the mission that he has been tasked. And he’ll continue to do it as long as he’s asked.”

To be fair, LaNeve does have a solid résumé. Before commanding the 8th Army in Korea, he was in charge of the 82nd Airborne, including commanding paratroopers stationed in Poland after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He deployed numerous times to Iraq and Afghanistan and served in various Pentagon positions, including as director of operations, readiness, and mobilization, which made him a key figure in deploying the National Guard to Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021. His son and daughter serve as officers in the Army. All of this ticks the right boxes for a general.

And yet, people who know him tell me, there’s nothing exceptional about it either—at least not in this ultra-competitive community. His C.V. is, well, fine. Which is perhaps why he originally volunteered to be considered for Hegseth’s special military advisor. It was a position few wanted, given Hegseth’s unpopularity with general officers. Serving in this position would put LaNeve directly in the line of fire, but it would also offer him lots of facetime with the boss. Maybe if they clicked…

“Chris was advised that it would be critical for his career to throw his hat in the ring for senior military advisor,” a former Pentagon official told me. And so he did.

Hegseth clearly liked LaNeve enough to view him as a loyal retainer he could install in important positions, particularly those held by people he didn’t trust. Which is how LaNeve has come to be seen as a proxy in Hegseth’s feud with Army Secretary Dan Driscoll—a rival he can’t fire because Driscoll is law school pals with the Vances. Instead, Hegseth fired Mingus and George, the generals who were working directly for Driscoll, and replaced them, one after the other, with LaNeve.

In the meantime, Hegseth continues to transform the Pentagon into his personal fiefdom, having fired nearly 30 generals and admirals for no clear cause. Was it because they were close to Lloyd Austin or Mark Milley; Black or a woman; insufficiently loyal to Trump—or to Hegseth? Hegseth also appears to be targeting officers who are independent-minded, or who command their troops’ loyalty in a way that Hegseth may find threatening. It’s not lost on anyone that this constant fear of being purged—and the idea that anyone can be targeted at any time and for seemingly no reason—is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes.

The coincidence of LaNeve’s rise at a time when so many other general officers are being culled hasn’t improved his reputation, either. “So many of the Army’s talented generals are being attacked or fired—and there’s one that’s ascending?” the defense official said. “That kind of makes you wonder.” A second retired Army general concurred. “More than 20 generals and admirals are gone in just over a year, not one of them relieved for cause, and now you got a guy who vaults up twice?” said the general, who knows LaNeve. “He obviously passed a test that all the other guys didn’t.”

Meanwhile, LaNeve seems to be using his proximity to Hegseth to settle an old score or two. According to three sources familiar with the situation, back when LaNeve’s nomination to lead the 8th Army in Korea got held up by Tommy Tuberville, he was asked to vacate his house at Ft. Bragg—making room for the incoming commander of the 82nd Airborne, Major General J. Patrick Work. LaNeve, according to these sources, was furious and felt that the Army had mistreated him. According to all three sources, LaNeve has since used his position to go after Work, who is seen as a promising up-and-comer. “He came back [from Korea] and is taking things out on Work, whispering things in Hegseth’s ear,” the former defense official told me. Work is now quietly being sidelined, according to the defense official.

Because LaNeve’s upward march seems to be over the gravestones of the superstars’ careers, his standing in Pentagon circles has taken a beating. “He’s got a terrible reputation in the Army,” a third retired Army general, who also knows LaNeve, told me. “Because people are perceiving that he’s manipulating Hegseth, or Hegseth is manipulating him, or both.” Whether or not he was actually complicit in the purges doesn’t seem to matter to a cadre that is outraged by the bloodbath—especially when LaNeve appears to be one of the only clear winners. Everyone I spoke to told me they believed he was responsible for ousting Mingus and had something to do with George’s ouster, too. (“Those are political decisions that Gen. LaNeve doesn’t take part in,” Sulzona said.) As the former defense official told me, “Chris is now participating in a slow-motion coup going on in the Army.”

And though LaNeve’s star is ascendant, the people who know how the system works believe he is helping dismantle the very edifice he’s standing on. For LaNeve, this has to be a black fly in his Chardonnay: To the military elite, the only thing that really matters is the opinion of their peers. “Everyone is going to be watching LaNeve,” the second retired Army general told me. “If he’s always known as Hegseth’s boy, if it looks like I just reached down and grabbed my favorite guy, it erodes trust in the system. The way this has come about, it undermines him.”

That’s all for me this week, friends. Hopefully, I’ll see some of you out and about this weekend. Until then, good night. Tomorrow will be worse.

Julia

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