Pentagon Purge Resumes: 3-Star Defense Health Commander Forced Into Retirement

A week after the Trump administration fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and five more senior Pentagon officers, another head rolled on Friday as the three-star commander of the Defense Health Agency (DHA) retired — with sources telling Reuters that retirement was forced on her. 

As DHA commander, US Army Lt. Gen. Telita Crosland oversaw a vast medical system serving more than 9.5 million service members, retirees and family members around the world via more than 700 hospitals and clinics with a staff of more than 130,000 service members, civilian employees and contractors.  

News of her sudden retirement broke Friday morning, with acting Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs Stephen Ferrara notifying DHA service members and civilian employees. In an email obtained by ZeroHedge, he wrote:  

“This morning, Army Lieutenant General (LTG) Dr. Telita Crosland, the fourth Director of the Defense Health Agency (DHA), is beginning her retirement. I want to thank LTG Crosland for her dedication to the nation, to the Military Health System, and to Army Medicine for the past 32 years. I have designated Dr. David Smith, the Acting Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, as the Acting Director of the DHA while the Department conducts the normal nomination process.”

On Friday evening, Reuters was first to confirm universal suspicions that Crosland’s sudden retirement wasn’t her idea, with both a current and former official saying she was ordered to retire. The officials, spoke to the news agency on condition of anonymity, said she was not given a reason for being pushed out of the military after a career spanning more than 30 years. A West Point graduate who started her Army service as a Medical Corps officer in 1993, Crosland was given the DHA command after serving as the Army’s Deputy Surgeon General. 

While specific reasons for Crosland’s retirement have yet to surface, leftists were quick to race to their own predictable, knee-jerk conclusions. Here’s a sampling from the r/fednews subreddit, which is the center of the universe for federal employees wailing about Trump’s shrinking and restructuring of the US government workforce: 

• “She had too much honor and integrity for this administration, so they shoved her aside for a nice, obedient white man.”
•  ”She is far too not a white man.”
• “Anyone still pretending these aren’t racist fascists are fools.”
• “One more racially-motivated dismissal.”
• She definitely was removed for being a POC and a female.” 

Crosland’s forced resignation capped a week of momentous moves by the Trump administration vis-a-vis the Pentagon.

• Last Friday brought an extraordinary mass-firing that took out the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff USAF Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., Chief of Naval Operations Adm Lisa Franchetti, Air Force Vice Chief of Staff James Slife, and the judge advocates general of the Army, Navy and Air Force.   
• Wednesday gave us a court filing in which the Department of Defense declared that it’s about to initiate a fast-paced program to ferret out transgender military members and discharge them from the military