Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse speaks during a hearing on Capitol Hill, on May 2, 2024.
Mark Schiefelbein/AP/File

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired a general whose agency’s initial intelligence assessment of damage to Iranian nuclear sites from US strikes angered President Donald Trump, according to two people familiar with the decision and a White House official.

Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse will no longer serve as head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly.

Hegseth also fired Vice Adm. Nancy Lacore, who is chief of the Navy Reserve, as well as Rear Adm. Milton Sands, a Navy SEAL officer who oversees Naval Special Warfare Command, another US official said.

The reasons for their firings, the latest in a series targeting military leaders, were not clear Friday.

The Trump administration increasingly has moved against both the military leadership and the intelligence community. Some current and former national security officials saw their security clearances revoked this week in a tactic that the administration has used against perceived foes.

Critics say the administration’s actions could chill dissent and send a signal that the intelligence community should be careful in reaching conclusions at odds with Trump’s interests.

Kruse’s firing comes a few months after details of a preliminary assessment of US airstrikes against Iran leaked to the media. It found that Iran’s nuclear program has been set back only a few months, contradicting assertions from Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Republican president, who had pronounced the Iranian program “completely and fully obliterated,” rejected the report.

In a news conference following the June strikes, Hegseth lambasted the press for focusing on the preliminary assessment but did not offer any direct evidence of the destruction of Iranian nuclear production facilities.

“You want to call it destroyed, you want to call it defeated, you want to call it obliterated — choose your word. This was an historically successful attack,” Hegseth said then.

While the Pentagon has offered no details on the firings, Democrats in Congress have raised alarm over the precedent Kruse’s ouster sets for the intelligence community.

“The firing of yet another senior national security official underscores the Trump administration’s dangerous habit of treating intelligence as a loyalty test rather than a safeguard for our country,” said Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called on the administration to show why Kruse was fired or “otherwise, we can only assume that this is another politically motivated decision intended to create an atmosphere of fear” within the intelligence community.

The firing of Kruse, Lacore, and Sands was earlier reported by The Washington Post.

Trump has a history of removing government officials whose data and analysis he disagrees with. Earlier this month, after a lousy jobs report, he fired the official in charge of the data. His administration has also stopped posting reports on climate change, canceled studies on vaccine access and removed data on gender identity from government sites.

The new firings culminate a week of broad Trump administration changes to the intelligence community and shakeups to the military leadership. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence — which is responsible for coordinating the work of 18 intelligence agencies, including DIA — announced that it would slash its staff and budget.

The Pentagon announced this week that the Air Force’s top uniformed officer, Gen. David Allvin, planned to retire two years early.

Hegseth and Trump have been aggressive in dismissing top military officials, often without formal explanation.

The administration has fired Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr. as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as the Navy’s top officer, the Air Force’s second highest-ranking officer, and the top lawyers for three military service branches.

In April, Hegseth fired Gen. Tim Haugh as head of the National Security Agency and Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield, who was a senior official at NATO.

No public explanations have been offered by the Pentagon for any of these firings, though some of the officers were believed by the administration to endorse diversity, equity and inclusion programs.