The Pentagon on Friday announced four new senior advisers to Defense Secretary Pete Hegses following a front office infighting that saw five senior staff leave in the past few weeks.
New advisors include former junior military assistant Colonel Ricky Breer, former Department of Defense “special assistant” Patrick Weaver, and Justin Fulcher, a top doge employee in the Pentagon.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell was promoted to the Secretary of Defense assistant for civil servants and senior advisers.
“Regular workforce coordination is a hallmark of a highly efficient organization,” Kingsley Wilson, acting Pentagon journalist secretary, said in a statement announcing his new role.
“Secretary Heggs will continue to work actively with HR decisions and work hard to ensure that the Pentagon has the right people in the right position to implement President Trump’s agenda,” she continued.
The statement confirms the recent upheaval in the department that was removed after top staffers Dan Caldwell, Colin Carroll and Darrin Sernick were accused of information leaks earlier this month.
Another Pentagon spokesman, John Ulitt, decided to leave the building he said was in “complete confusion” under Heggs’s guidance.
And although Hegses Secretary Joe Casper, who initially aimed at taking another job in the building, chose to leave the Pentagon and return to the private sector, he remains a special government employee.
All the confusion comes when Hegses is surrounded after the revelation of the second signal chat group. He reportedly shared highly sensitive information with his wife, brothers, lawyers and others about the US airstrikes against Yemen’s Hauti militants.
The four men named for the new Pentagon status seem to have little experience in the government.
Parnell, a former Army ranger, served in the military for six years before running the failed 2020 campaign for the US home. He then ran temporarily for the US Senate in Pennsylvania, and even received President Trump’s approval prior to the 2022 primary, but stopped his campaign after suffering from domestic abuse allegations.
Bria, a Marine and former aide to President Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, has had multiple battle developments and quickly gained the trust of Hegus. However, he is being scrutinized for his role in helping to promote the use of signals within the Pentagon.
Fulcher, the founder of a bankrupt global telehealth startup, is part of billionaire Elon Musk’s doge team. He served in the first Trump administration in the Department of Homeland Security, and later earned his Masters in Non-Proliferation and Terrorism Studies from the Middlebury International Institute in Monterey in 2023.
However, the qualifications and claims he created for Fulcher are Last month’s Forbes articleone former business partner says Fulcher owes him hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Weaver appears to have the most government experience as a former special assistant to Hegus, who also served in the DHS and the National Security Council’s first Trump administration. Following on, he was the legislative head of two GOP House members.
The new acting spokesperson, Wilson, has limited experience with the Pentagon and government-wide. The 26-year-old, whose father, Steve Cortez, is a former Trump campaign adviser, has been deputy press secretary since February.
Last month, lawmakers and Jewish groups criticized Wilson for their history of anti-Semitic and biased social media posts and public commentary before joining the Trump administration.
