Amazing how a good night’s sleep can change the flavor of a post. On Tuesday when I read this spoof-worthy weak-cheese hit piece on the Chief of Naval Operations by Greg Jaffe and Kate Kelly over at the New York Times, I was—to be blunt—pissed. It was so clear what this was and the goal of it all.
After a Wednesday at the paying gig that got too busy to finish the post, I found myself Wednesday night as I doing my final editing, feeling a bit bad. Not for Admiral Caudle—he’ll be fine as this smear is so lame—but for Jaffe and Kelly.
It is such a poorly constructed hatchet-job that it couldn’t be something that a pair—a pair—of reporters would take to their editor and say, “We have something important…”
This reads like an editor-or-higher directed a hit piece trying to—for reasons best known by the parties involved—to dirty up and politicize one of the more benign and mission focused people in DC, the CNO. I assume that is why Jaffe and Kelly put out this wildly unbalanced article.
The authors cannot be all that proud of this work. It is narrowly sourced, has no smoking guns, no solid evidence, and no tie-ins with breaking news. Indeed, it mostly reads like the byproduct of a couple of interviews with bitter-ender leftists stewing over their regular paycheck, tired of being forced to defend their service to DJT’s Pentagon to all their DC-commute-range peers. So, they found someone at the NYT who still thinks diversity-uber-alles in mid-2026.
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