Retired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, who served as the 33rd chief of naval operations (CNO) from November 2023 to February 2025, joined the Institute of Politics as a Pritzker Fellow for winter and spring. Franchetti spoke with the Maroon about her 40-year career in the Navy, women’s role in the military, and her future plans.
Franchetti joined the Navy at a time when women were barred by law from serving on combatant ships. She left the military as the first woman to serve as CNO and sit on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as the second woman to be promoted to four-star admiral in the United States.
A native of Rochester, New York, Franchetti attended Northwestern, where she majored in journalism. She joined the university’s Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC) as a freshman in 1981.
“I did join for free college [and] free textbooks, and also the chance to see the world. But I definitely stayed for all the great teams I got to be part of, for the mission, and the chance to be part of something greater than myself,” she told the Maroon.
By joining the NROTC, Franchetti committed to serving four years in the Navy after receiving her bachelor’s degree.
“When I joined in 1985, it was still the Cold War—there was still the Soviet Union, and it was a very different time,” she said. “I really wanted to be part of that team and continue to represent America, to really be this beacon of hope and democracy.”
Franchetti’s first sea tour was on the USS Shenandoah, a destroyer tender that provided maintenance support to warships. After the law barring women from serving on combatant vessels was repealed by Congress in 1993, she went to her first combatant ship—the destroyer USS Moosbrugger—as an operations officer. Franchetti went on to command the missile destroyer USS Ross, a destroyer squadron, and carrier strike groups. She later oversaw a Tomahawk missile strike by a submarine on Syrian chemical facilities in 2018. Before her appointment as CNO, Franchetti was the vice chief of naval operations.
In November 2023, the U.S. Senate confirmed Franchetti as CNO in a 95–1 vote, making her responsible for a force of about 600,000 personnel. With the change came new dimensions to the job, she said.
“As the head of the Navy, you are representing the Navy to lots of different stakeholders. So, you’re not just taking care of your sailors, but you’re also representing the Navy to Congress. You’re representing the Navy to the American people,” Franchetti said. “I would say our nation suffers a little bit from sea blindness. [The Navy] does stuff over the horizon, so you may not even know why you need a Navy.”
In addition to its warfighting purpose, the Navy also advances national interests in many ways in peacetime. “We can support diplomacy, humanitarian assistance, and disaster relief,” she said. “And, of course, we support the economy. Ninety-four percent of global trade floats on sea water, and so navies are really important.”
Franchetti had direct involvement in the Navy’s diplomatic and humanitarian work as commander of Pacific Partnership 2010, leading a deployment to Southeast Asia to provide healthcare assistance and rehearse coordinated disaster relief operations with partner countries.
As CNO, Franchetti disseminated a navigation plan in 2024 that aimed to prepare the Navy for the possibility of war with China by 2027. The year before its release, U.S. intelligence had determined that Chinese President Xi Jinping had directed the People’s Liberation Army to be prepared to invade Taiwan by then. “The Chairman of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has told his forces to be ready for war by 2027—we will be more ready,” the navigation plan stated.
“I was really focused on the challenges posed by the People’s Republic of China and a lot of their non-transparent activity,” Franchetti told the Maroon. “They are the only country that could potentially rewrite the rules-based international order that has really supported our economy and potentially impact the freedom of the seas [and] the ability of other nations to use their seas and to have free commerce.”
Franchetti’s navigation plan emphasized investing in people and weapons systems, as well as reducing maintenance delays so that ships could spend more time at sea. She also highlighted the importance of integrating robotic and autonomous systems into carrier and strike groups, as well as streamlining information and intelligence.
“Some people think that warfare is like World War II: a bunch of ships are near each other and sink each other,” she said. “But it takes a lot of integrated capabilities, whether it’s space, cyber, undersea, on the sea, [or] above the sea. You need operation centers that can control and manage all that information.”
CNOs are appointed for four-year terms. But in February 2025, just a month after President Donald Trump’s second inauguration and only a year and three months into her tenure, Franchetti was relieved of her duties by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
Some analysts have situated Franchetti’s dismissal within a larger movement by the Trump administration to remove women and minorities from military leadership. But Franchetti characterized the administration as scrutinizing military leaders’ alignment towards its goals, rather than the leaders’ identities.
“I think the most important thing for people to understand is that all officers serve at the pleasure of the president,” she said. “When the Trump administration came in, they had different priorities, and I think perhaps they felt like many of the people they removed would potentially not be aligned with their priorities, and so they set about removing those people.”
“It really seems to be their view [that firings should be based on] whether or not these folks will be able to execute the administration’s policies,” she said, adding that “women, minorities, [and] white men” have all been dismissed.
Other senior military personnel to have been dismissed include Joint Chiefs Chairman Charles Q. Brown Jr., Commandant of the Coast Guard Linda Fagan, and, most recently, Army Chief of Staff Randy George.
Despite her dismissal, Franchetti stressed the growth in opportunities for women in the Navy that she had witnessed over the course of her career. “We really made a tremendous amount of progress from the time that I came [into] the Navy, when there were hardly any women at sea [and] you couldn’t command a ship,” Franchetti said. “Now all the doors are wide open: we have women commanding ships, we have women commanding strike groups, [and] we have women executive officers of submarines. I think it’s important not to lose sight of all that progress while remembering that it’s always a work in progress.”
Her departure may have come sooner than anticipated, but Franchetti looks back with satisfaction on her military journey, as well as how the roles of women in the Navy are only growing. “Although I’m not serving now, I don’t have any regrets. I had an amazing 40-year career. I loved every minute of it, and there are so many women following along in my wake who are incredibly talented [and] who have been promoted based on their own merit, so they’re going to just keep rising.”
“I feel there’s such a huge number of people that are coming that it may have just been a brief setback for me,” she added, referring to her dismissal. “It’s not really a setback for the Navy writ large.”
For 40 years, Franchetti’s duties within the world’s largest navy had only grown larger and larger. When that pattern ended, it took some time to adjust. “The day that you give up command, it’s very strange, because all of a sudden that burden of command is gone,” Franchetti said. “You sit there checking your phone—‘Why is no one contacting me?’ There’s nothing going on, and it takes you a little bit of a while to wind down from that level of intensity.”
Now, Franchetti is finding herself adapting to a strange new world: civilian life. “It doesn’t really matter if you retire after 20 or 40 years like me—you’re really entering an entirely new playing field with new rules, new ways of networking, new ways of building your brand, [and] new ways of introducing yourself [or] creating a CV.”
“It’s been a lot of fun,” she added.
After her departure from the Navy, Franchetti worked with the United States Studies Centre in Australia and the China Forum at the University of California, San Diego, before coming to UChicago.
“[There are] so many different things that you can do that you can become very busy if you [aren’t] mindful of what your priorities are,” Franchetti said. “So, my number one priority is, of course, spending time with my family, spending time with my friends, and then having really meaningful and interesting work and working with people that [I] want to work with.”
Franchetti offered advice for college students: “When I was in college…I wanted my life to be like I-95, Maine to Florida. I wanted to know when I was [going to] have my kids, where I was [going to] live, and what jobs I was [going to] have,” she said. “But life is a lot more like the Potomac River—there are eddies where you get stuck, there are branches where you have to make choices, rapids that you don’t expect. I really feel like, if you’re open to all the possibilities of that river, you’re [going to] end up exactly where you’re supposed to be.”
