Salena Zito has a long interview with SecDef Pete Hegseth where he talks about how the bureaucratic inertia of the Pentagon is his immediate foe. The ideology he has to fight is DEI, and that creates an interesting dilemma for career military officers. Like most of Zito's work, the interview is worth your time.
Reading it gets me thinking about military life for the officer corps. An officer's career normally spans something like 20-30 years. During that time one will serve as few as 3 or as many as 8 presidents, often of both parties. Policies can change with new administrations, such a change has just occurred.
We went from "gung-ho DEI" under Biden to "no DEI" under Trump. Presuming each administration promotes those most closely aligned with its policies, one administration's fair haired boys (and girls) can become anathema for the next administration.
Hegseth faces a bunch of generals and admirals who, either from conviction or in pursuit of career advancement and prized assignments, espoused DEI. They went on record saying DEI was wonderful, the only moral choice.
They now have to live with those statements hanging around their necks like so many putrefying albatrosses. Let's stipulate they are unhappy campers reporting to a Trump White House, which finds them ideologically incompatible. Expect to see a fair number of retirements as a result.