SEAL Commander Fired After Clashes With Pentagon
Inside the firing of Rear Admiral Jamie Sands, whose push for accountability and transparency collided with Hegseth’s vision for Naval Special Warfare.
Rear Adm. Milton “Jamie” Sands, the two-star commander of the Navy SEALs, was fired Friday after repeated clashes with Pentagon leadership over his handling of high-profile cases and cultural battles inside Naval Special Warfare.
Sands’ defenders say his removal was political, the result of months of friction with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his allies. But his critics faulted his judgment in several controversies, from a decision that blindsided the Justice Department and scuttled a plea deal, to his push for female instructors in SEAL training, to his handling of a Navy board tied to the 2022 death of trainee Kyle Mullen.
A spokeswoman for Naval Special Warfare referred questions to the Navy’s chief information office, which declined to comment.
From the outset, Sands brought a values-driven approach to command, emphasizing what he called the “non-negotiable” SEAL ethos of abandoning self and embracing the team. In an appearance on The Program Podcast, he warned leaders against two failures he viewed as catastrophic for discipline and morale. One was misplaced loyalty or prioritizing personal relationships over the organization. The other was willful blindness, ignoring “unacceptable, illegal, immoral, unethical, just bad” conduct.
That philosophy put Sands on a collision course with the civilian military leadership under a president who has ticked many of those boxes. Less than a year after taking command of Naval Special Warfare in Coronado, California, the admiral who gained national attention in 2016 for cracking down on drug abuse within the SEALs was abruptly dismissed.
“He’s an incredible SEAL officer who leads with integrity and was always apolitical and professional,” said Alex Plitsas, a former Pentagon official who has known Sands since his early career. Others in the SEAL community echoed that defense. “Jamie Sands is an upstanding, high-character leader,” former SEAL officer Dave Madden wrote on X. “Which is almost certainly why Trump/Hegseth fired him.”
A senior Navy official told The After-Action Report that frustration over Sands’ leadership had been building for months, culminating in his abrupt dismissal. The official pointed to specific controversies during his tenure, like his handling of the investigation into the drowning deaths of two SEALs.