The unrest at the pinnacle of the military’s leadership is highly unusual. Hegseth has been the focus of a Pentagon Inspector General’s review of his handling of sensitive military information via the commercial app Signal.

His exit comes a month after he fired off a memo announcing an investigation into “unauthorized disclosures of sensitive and classified information across the Department of Defense.”

Kasper is the fifth Defense official to leave the agency in the past week amid investigations of internal leaks within the agency.