(Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com) Adm. Alvin Holsey, the commander of US Southern Command who abruptly announced he was stepping down in October, was pushed out by US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
The report said that Hegseth and Holsey were at odds during the first months of the Trump administration, and the tension intensified when Holsey expressed concerns about the “murky legal authority” for the bombing campaign against alleged drug boats in Latin America, which is clearly illegal under US and international law.
Holsey also objected that parts of the operation fell outside of his control since other military units under separate chains of command were also involved, including elite special operations units. Earlier in the year, Hegseth was unhappy with Holsey for not drawing up plans to “reclaim” the Panama Canal quickly enough and suspected that the four-star admiral may have been involved in leaks of potential US plans for the waterway.
Holsey hasn’t given a reason for his early retirement, which is highly unusual for a career military officer just one year into a three-year term as the head of a combatant command. When he first announced he was stepping down in October, The New York Times reported that he had raised concerns about the boat strikes.
At the time, Hegseth praised Holsey in a statement on his retirement, which officials told the Times “masked real policy tensions concerning Venezuela that the admiral and his civilian boss were seeking to paper over.”
The revelation from the Journal that Hegseth pushed out Holsey comes as the US war chief is under increasing scrutiny over the first bombing of an alleged drug boat on September 2, which involved more than one strike to kill survivors. Hegseth has shifted his story on the attack, now claiming he wasn’t in the room for the second strike and has placed responsibility for the order on Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the commander of US Special Operations Command.
This article originally appeared at Antiwar.com.
