Senior officials in executive branch positions serve at the pleasure of the president, who, despite what any number of liberal judges and politicians would have us believe, actually runs the executive branch of the federal government. That means if you displease the president, you’re subject to dismissal, which dismissal might come from the cabinet-level official who oversees your duty position.

Like, say, the Secretary of Defense. Case in point: On Friday, we learned that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has sacked the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse. It was under General Kruse’s watch that the DIA released an initial assessment of the damage done by the American attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, which assessment was, shall we say, vigorously disagreed with. Hegseth, at the time, replied rather sharply to that assessment:

Hegseth described the assessment as a “preliminary report that’s deemed to be a low assessment. You know what a low assessment means? Low confidence in the data in that report.”

“If you want to make an assessment of what happened at Fordow, you better get a big shovel and go really deep,” Hegseth said, referring to one of the nuclear facilities targeted by the U.S. “Because Iran’s nuclear program is obliterated…Those that dropped the bombs precisely in the right place know exactly what happened when that exploded. And you know who else knows? Iran.”

Now, possibly in part because of that assessment, General Kruse has been relieved.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has fired Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the latest senior military or intelligence officer to lose his position in a wider purge of national security agencies’ top ranks, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, didn’t immediately cite a reason for the dismissal other than “loss of confidence,” a catchall term Hegseth has used to justify the sacking of other senior military officers this year.

The firing follows a preliminary assessment from the DIA — the Pentagon’s main intelligence wing — of the military strikes on Iran’s three main nuclear sites in June, which prompted vicious backlash from the Trump administration after it was first reported by CNN and the New York Times.

General Kruse isn’t the first such person to be given, as my Navy friends might say, the old “heave-ho.”

Since entering office, Hegseth has fired a slate of America’s most senior military officers, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles “C.Q.” Brown, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti, Coast Guard Commandant Linda Fagan and Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Slife.

Every one of the officers mentioned was a Biden administration appointee. It’s not terribly unusual for a new administration to replace such appointees with its own people.

General Kruse, a United States Air Force officer, previously served as director of intelligence for the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, then worked as Director for Defense Intelligence (Warfighter Support) for the Under Secretary of Defense (Intelligence) before being nominated for promotion to his current rank and then appointed as Director of the DIA by Joe Biden, or possibly by whatever intern was running the autopen that day.