In a historic and unprecedented move, the Trump administration on Friday night fired the Joint Chiefs chairman, the Navy^[1]'s top officer, the Air Force^[2] vice chief of staff, and the judge advocates general of three service branches.

President Donald Trump, in a social media post, announced the firing of Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Charles "CQ" Brown and nominated currently retired and little known Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan "Razin" Caine to take the post.

Then, minutes later, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that he had fired the Navy's top officer -- Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to hold the post -- as well as the Air Force's second-highest officer, Gen. James Slife. Hegseth said he was also removing the judge advocates general of the Army^[3], Navy and Air Force, who oversee the military justice system.

Read Next: Thousands of Pentagon Civilian Workers Will Be Fired Next Week as Trump Purge Begins^[4]

The culling of top military leadership came on the same day the Pentagon announced it will fire 5,400 civilian employees^[5] next week as the first step in reducing Defense Department staffing by 5% to 8%. It said the move would be followed by a hiring freeze.

Taken together, the firing of at least six top military leaders is a historic, though legal, gutting of military ranks by civilian leadership. Several of the names -- especially Brown and Franchetti -- had become targets of Hegseth and other figures in conservative circles who argued, without evidence, that they had gotten the job to fill a diversity quota rather than on merit.

Neither Trump nor Hegseth offered any explanation as to why any of the officers were being fired and did not provide any details about the exact nature of their removal.

Trump and billionaire Elon Musk have fired thousands of federal employees in recent weeks from agencies including the Department of Veterans Affairs^[6], often with few details. The gutting of the federal workforce has caused increasing outcry and frustration in Washington, D.C., and across the country.

In Brown's place, Trump made the highly unusual move of nominating a currently retired three-star Air Force general whom he said was an "accomplished pilot, national security expert, successful entrepreneur, and a 'warfighter' with significant interagency and special operations^[7] experience."

While legally and traditionally, the chairman has to be either the serving vice chairman, one of the service secretaries, or a combatant commander, the law also allows the commander in chief to waive the requirement^[8] "if the president determines such action is necessary in the national interest."

It's not clear whether Caine will take on the job as a civilian or return to military service.

Hegseth also made the unusual move of not announcing replacements for Franchetti, Slife or the top lawyers of the Army, Navy and Air Force. Instead, he said he was "requesting nominations" for the posts.

Brown, who notably stepped into his prior role as the Air Force's top uniformed leader under Trump's first administration and was confirmed by the Senate, was long identified as a prime target of the firings under the new Pentagon leadership and ideology.

He was confirmed by the Senate as Joint Chiefs chairman in September 2023.

"First of all, you've got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs," Hegseth, prior to his confirmation as defense secretary, said on a podcast in November.

"Any general that was involved, any general, admiral, whatever, that was involved in any of the [diversity, equity and inclusion] woke sh-- has got to go."

However, weeks later, on his first day of work at the Pentagon, Hegseth was asked directly whether he wanted to fire Brown as the general stood beside him.

"I'm standing with him right now. Look forward to working with him," Hegseth said at the time, seemingly offering a mild endorsement of Brown -- who is Black -- to the president.

In an emotional June 2020 video, just prior to becoming Air Force chief of staff, Brown said^[9] in the wake of George Floyd's death at the hands of police that he was "thinking about a history of racial issues and my own experiences that didn't always sing of liberty and equality" and added he would "lead, participate in, and listen to necessary conversations on racism, diversity and inclusion."

In August 2022, Brown signed an Air Force memo^[10] that established historic diversity goals for officer applicants, saying it was "imperative that the composition of our military services better reflect our nation's highly talented, diverse and eligible population."

Ultimately, those goals were never fully reached in the two years they were set, Military.com previously reported, and they were quickly scrapped this month under Hegseth's leadership.

Meanwhile, Franchetti was confirmed by the Senate as the first female military admiral to oversee the Navy -- the chief of naval operations -- in August 2023 after serving as the vice chief.

Franchetti's tenure has largely been uneventful, and she hasn't issued any dramatic policies or instituted any major changes to the Navy during her time in office that would have run afoul of the Trump administration and its focus on stripping the military of any diversity measures.

During her confirmation hearing, Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, went after a 2021 CNO reading list^[11] put together by Franchetti's predecessor, Adm. Mike Gilday, that included titles like "How to be an Antiracist" by Ibram X. Kendi.

"I don't know why there's so much focus on race," Sullivan said while asking whether Franchetti would commit to getting back to what Sullivan sees as "normal reading lists for sailors and Marines."

Franchetti demurred, telling the senator that she would "develop a process" for selecting books for her reading lists but noted that she "will focus on warfighting, warfighters and winning" -- now a popular theme with Hegseth.

In contrast, the last time Gilday was confronted by Republicans over similar allegations in April -- then focused on a brief video of a non-binary sailor who was proud of an opportunity to read a poem to her ship -- he offered a full-throated defense of the sailor^[12] and the Navy's push to be more inclusive.

"That level of trust that a commanding officer develops across that unit has to be able to be grounded on dignity and respect," Gilday said.

However, Hegseth also took aim at Franchetti in his most recent book^[13], in which he claimed she was unqualified for the job and was chosen for the role because "politics is all about optics instead of results."

"Naval operations being weakened won't matter to anyone," he added.

Finally, Slife, who was serving as the vice chief of staff of the Air Force, has also been a target of Republican criticisms for voicing concerns about racism in the ranks.

In a since-deleted memo from May 2020, Slife -- then the head of Air Force Special Operations -- expressed concerns, like Brown did, in the wake of Floyd's death at the hands of police and encouraged airmen to be mindful.

"We'd be naive to think issues of institutional racism and unconscious bias don't affect us," the memo, viewed by Military.com on an archived webpage, reads. "We can't ignore it. We have to face it. And to face it, we have to talk about it."

Related: Thousands of Pentagon Civilian Workers Will Be Fired Next Week as Trump Purge Begins^[14]

The Pentagon announced Friday it will fire 5,400 civilian employees next week -- and potentially tens of thousands more -- as part of President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk's ongoing effort to slash personnel and spending throughout the federal government.

The massive round of firings is part of an "initial effort" to cut the Defense Department's civilian workforce by 5% to 8% and was to be followed up with a hiring freeze, as thousands of employees at other federal agencies have been terminated in recent weeks or enticed to resign during the early days of the Trump administration.

"We expect approximately 5,400 probationary workers will be released beginning next week as part of this initial effort, after which we will implement a hiring freeze while we conduct a further analysis of our personnel needs," Darin Selnick, the man who is currently performing the duties of the under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said in a statement.

Read Next: The Pentagon Won't Celebrate Black History. Relatives of Heroes Worry Family Legacies Will Be Hidden Away^[1]

"As the secretary made clear, it is simply not in the public interest to retain individuals whose contributions are not mission-critical," Selnick said in the statement.

It was unclear on Friday what positions and employees would be affected, and the Pentagon did not provide any additional information beyond the brief statement.

Almost half of the civilian employees in the department are veterans.

The department was apparently backing off plans to fire all civilian employees who are still in the early stages of their employment. The move Friday also comes after firings at the Department of Veterans Affairs^[2], as well as many other agencies.

The announcement is the first concrete word from the Defense Department on how it plans to proceed with an effort to pare down its civilian workforce after media reports emerged earlier this week that the Pentagon had plans to fire roughly 50,000 probationary employees en masse.

However, CNN reported Wednesday^[3] that the plan would run afoul of the law.

In a video posted to social media Thursday^[4] evening, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the plan is to conduct a "really thorough look at our workforce top to bottom, and it will be top to bottom, to see where we can find and eliminate redundancies."

"Now common sense would tell us where we should start, right? We start with poor performers amongst our probationary employees because that is common sense and you want the best and brightest," Hegseth said.

Friday's statement from Selnick said the big reduction in the DoD civilian workforce is meant to "produce efficiencies and refocus the department on the president's priorities and restoring readiness in the force."

The Pentagon's top priorities are securing U.S. borders, building an "Iron Dome for America," and ending diversity programs, according to a statement Wednesday by Robert Salesses, who is performing the duties of deputy secretary of defense.

In his 8-minute video Thursday, Hegseth took several opportunities to slam "legacy media" with the claim they had "misrepresented" or incorrectly reported on the efforts of Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which arrived at the Pentagon this week to begin accessing its spending data.

However, a 2023 study by the Government Accountability Office^[5] said that the department had around 700,000 civilian employees. A reduction of 5% to 8% would mean that Hegseth and his deputies are looking to ultimately fire the same number of employees that was reported earlier this week -- between 35,000 and 56,000 people.

That same report found that, in 2021, 287,000 Defense Department employees -- just under 39% -- were veterans. According to a union that represents government employees^[6], that percentage has now risen to 46%.

Furthermore, Hegseth is not the first leader in the Trump administration to claim that a purge of employees would focus on low performers. However, reporting from CNN showed^[7] that, whatever the intent, the outcome seems to be that the firings are arbitrary and often encompass top-performing employees.

DOGE's efforts at trimming the federal workforce have also generated numerous headlines^[8] of the Trump administration^[9] firing key employees such as experts who are responsible for America's nuclear weapons or scientists trying to fight a worsening outbreak of bird flu only to realize their mistake and try to hire those employees back.

Military.com has also reported^[10] that DOGE's efforts at the Treasury Department have led to it snagging sensitive veterans data, including information about VA benefits, leading to concerns from experts and Democrats about the safety over that data, as well as the reliability of future payments of veterans benefits.

Numerous reports have emerged from other agencies that have been targeted by the Trump administration for reduction of employees being fired in surprise, mass emails -- sometimes even taking supervisors by surprise.

Selnick's statement claimed that, as they embark on the massive purge of employees, "the department will treat our workers with dignity and respect as it always does."

Hegseth's message on Thursday said that he was looking to develop a new, "performance-based standard" for future hires.

Related: 'Infinite Nightmares at Once': Veterans Data Swept Up in Musk's Takeover of Treasury System^[11]