Navy Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield, the US military representative to the NATO Military Committee, was relieved of her duties over the weekend following reports that she refused to hang portraits of President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at NATO headquarters.
She reportedly told military staff that they would wait out the Trump Administration, an indication of passive resistance to the commander in chief.
The dismissal was confirmed by the Pentagon on Tuesday.
Chatfield, 59, has had a 38-year career in the Navy. Born and raised in California, she graduated from Boston University in 1987 with a degree in International Relations and French, later earning a Master’s in Public Administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a Doctorate in Education from the University of San Diego.
She was commissioned through the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps and qualified as a naval helicopter pilot, flying aircraft such as the Boeing Vertol CH-46 Sea Knight and Sikorsky SH-60 Seahawk during deployments in the Pacific and Persian Gulf. She was commanding Helicopter Combat Support Squadron HC-5, a joint reconstruction team in Afghanistan (for which she earned a Bronze Star), and Joint Region Marianas.
In February 2023, she was promoted to vice admiral and assigned to the role at NATO, representing the US on the alliance’s 32-member military committee.
She has been a vocal advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion, notably stating in a 2015 Women’s Equality Day speech that “our diversity is our strength” and emphasizing the empowerment of women in the military.
According to posts on X, Chatfield refused to display official portraits of President Trump and Secretary Hegseth in her office at NATO headquarters in Brussels.
The conservative American Accountability Foundation had previously listed Chatfield among “woke” officers to be purged, citing her diversity-related comments as evidence of misplaced priorities.
Chatfield delivered a speech at a Women’s Equality Day event in 2015 where she bemoaned male dominance in Congress, where she claimed at the time, 80% of lawmakers in the House of Representatives were males.
“It seems a bit unequal what issues go forward,” she said. Chatfield also attended a Commander, Naval Air Forces DEI summit in 2022.
Sources said she held an “all hands” meeting and she told staff, “We will wait them out four years,” implying a strategy of passive resistance to the Trump administration’s policies. These details are unconfirmed by official Pentagon statements.
Sources familiar with the situation suggest that her refusal to hang the portraits—combined with her prior advocacy for diversity initiatives—made her a target of Defense Secretary Hegseth, who has vowed to eliminate “wokeness” from the military.
Chatfield’s ouster is the ninth firing of a senior military officer—and the fourth woman—since Trump’s return to office in January 2025. It follows the dismissals of figures like Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first female Chief of Naval Operations, and General Timothy Haugh of the National Security Agency, signaling an intensifying purge of leaders perceived as out of step with the administration’s agenda. With NATO allies already notified of her removal, the incident raises questions about U.S. credibility within the alliance at a time of heightened global security challenges.
As the Pentagon prepares to name Chatfield’s replacement, her dismissal underscores a deepening divide between military tradition and political pressures, leaving observers to wonder how far this reshaping of the armed forces will go—and at what cost to its unity and effectiveness.
