Pete Hegseth’s ‘Kill Everybody’ Command

W hen the Democratic Party released a video — featuring Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona along with five other Democratic lawmakers — solemnly telling our enlisted men and women that they had the right and responsibility to “refuse illegal orders,” my first reaction was to roll my eyes at what I assumed was the cynical “Resistance” theater of it all. My second was to think it a bad idea to encourage low-level soldiers and sailors to start venturing uninformed opinions about what was or was not an illegal order.

When Secretary of War Pete Hegseth immediately retaliated in the most vulgar of ways — by threatening to call Kelly back to active duty for court-martial — my resolve to dismiss the matter intensified: Here was yet another stupidly escalatory PR battle in D.C., with both Democrats and the administration provoking and threatening one another and distracting the public from (1) the increasingly miserable outlook for the American economy; (2) the fact that neither side has answers for it, but only one of them owns it.

But now you sort of have to wonder: Were Mark Kelly and others reacting to a rumor they might have heard? Marking their position in advance, waiting for another shoe to drop? Because it’s either that or they got stupidly, stupendously lucky in their timing. Right now they look eerily prescient, as we head into what by rights should be a huge scandal, one which would have serious consequences in any just world. (Note my hedge.)

Some setup is necessary. Recall that in late August the president suddenly declared rhetorical war on Venezuela and its narcotrafficking regime. He mused idly about overthrowing Maduro and moved American gunboats into South American waters, in an assertion of material force out of the 19th century. Then on September 2, he began having our navy blow South American (and largely Venezuelan) drug boats out of the water.

Subsequent months have been punctuated with such strikes, sometimes with images and video of the hits being released to the media: a production staged for American audiences, to create Trump’s idea of a televisual chest-thumping assertion of American power in our own backyard. A typical display, in many ways — perhaps that’s why I paid little attention to it, given how numb my other gig has made me to squalid political theater.

But yesterday the Washington Post broke the news that back in September, when the Trump administration launched that first strike, Hegseth was apparently very concerned about theater himself: For this opening salvo, Hegseth wanted a show of brute force emphasizing “lethality” (his favorite buzzword). To that end he issued a bloodthirsty command: “Kill everybody.” I’ll let the Post pick it up from there:

A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

It is important to note that Hegseth has not denied the story, and instead all but conceded it last night on Twitter. He opened with a typical blanket declaration that “[a]s usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland.” And then he went on to affirm his belief in “lethal, kinetic strikes” and make the farcical — and intentionally untestable — claim that “[e]very trafficker we kill is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization.” This of course is impossible to prove, but even more to the point: Trump designated these organizations as terrorists only five days ago. (You cannot make something like this go away by passing a law to change a legal definition, and especially not ex post facto!)

I’m no military expert, but this affair strikes me as an outright violation of all accepted norms of warfare. The mission had been accomplished: Whatever cargo that boat happened to be smuggling was no longer in any danger of reaching America. The survivors, clinging to a broken boat in the ocean, are a classic case of hors de combat — they’re out of the game, which means they have protected status under the Geneva Conventions. Even if you consider them “terrorists,” or so-called “unlawful combatants,” you are still forbidden from wantonly killing them once they’ve been incapacitated. (“Kill them all or they’ll just try again later” is a barbaric moral logic recognized nowhere in the civilized world except, seemingly, on Twitter.)

Beyond that, the sheer viciousness of it — a command to offer no quarter — shames the name and reputation of the U.S. Armed Services. You know what this reminds me most of? The Japanese Navy machine-gunning American boys as they floated in the waters of the Pacific during World War II. If you can explain the moral difference to me without reverting to the repulsive logic of immoral regimes, then please try.

But again, I am not an expert on the rules of military engagement. I will leave that to others who are, such as Jack Goldsmith, who points out that Section 5.4.7 of the Department of Defense’s own Law of War Manual, states rather clearly a “Prohibition Against Declaring That No Quarter Be Given”:

It is forbidden to declare that no quarter will be given. This means that it is prohibited to order that legitimate offers of surrender will be refused or that detainees, such as unprivileged belligerents, will be summarily executed. Moreover, it is also prohibited to conduct hostilities on the basis that there shall be no survivors, or to threaten the adversary with the denial of quarter. This rule is based on both humanitarian and military considerations. This rule also applies during non-international armed conflict.

I would get more upset about this if I weren’t so despairingly convinced that nothing will come of it, and Pete Hegseth will not be made to answer for this. As for the political fallout? I assume Trump will take a hit among what remaining Independents still cleave to his administration — Gallup just put him at a 36 percent job approval recently, about which much more on Tuesday — but his partisans are truly dug in. I have already seen Trump’s most dedicated fanatics not only wave this off but cheer it, and actively sneer at those of us who raise deep concern about the judgment of the man running the Pentagon. Even worse, they begin to make degraded moral arguments, the true sign of how the Trump era has rotted humane political sensibility: “Who cares about some drug smugglers? Are you on the side of the monsters ruining Appalachia with fentanyl?” Well no, as it turns out I am not, nor do I think we should be rocketing boats out of the water on the farcical pretext that they are “terrorists” the same way al-Qaeda and Hamas are.

More to the point, you should be deeply alarmed by the reckless bloodthirst on display from Pete Hegseth — a bloodthirst so unnerving to his colleagues that someone somewhere in the military chain of command apparently intervened. That’s the key detail that readers should pay attention to: The Pentagon knew they had done a terrible thing. Otherwise why would the policy have suddenly changed? (As NR alum John McCormack astutely notices, it may be more than just coincidence that the head of Southern Command, Admiral Alvin Holsey, abruptly announced plans to resign on October 16, two years ahead of schedule — and on the first day that the U.S. conducted a strike that left survivors that the Navy went to retrieve.) For a man who tirelessly promotes the “Warrior Ethos,” Pete Hegseth embodies little more than an enduring image of unanswerable disgrace.