WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Sunday defended President Donald Trump’s firing of the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s top military officer, arguing that he was “not the right man for the moment.”

Trump removed the chair, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., on Friday and nominated a retired three-star general to replace him. Hegseth followed that announcement by removing the chief of naval operations and the Defense Department’s top military lawyers.

Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Hegseth said “nothing about this is unprecedented,” adding that presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Barack Obama have fired or dismissed officers. A chair of the Joint Chiefs has never been fired, though when the position had two-year terms, the George W. Bush administration declined to renew the term of Gen. Peter Pace in 2007, citing opposition in Congress.

But Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said the series of firings “was completely unjustified.”

— The New York Times