My post on Trump’s war on Venezuela two days ago mentioned a Washington Post report (archived) about a war crime directly ordered by U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth:
The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.
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.
The Intercept had previously reported (archived) the second strike the U.S. military had launched against survivors:
People on board the boat off the coast of Venezuela that the U.S. military destroyed last Tuesday were said to have survived an initial strike, according to two American officials familiar with the matter. They were then killed shortly after in a follow-up attack.
…
Last week, a high-ranking Pentagon official who spoke to the Intercept on the condition of anonymity said that the strike in the Caribbean was a criminal attack on civilians and said that the Trump administration paved the way for it by firing the top legal authorities of the Army and the Air Force earlier this year.“The U.S. is now directly targeting civilians. Drug traffickers may be criminals but they aren’t combatants,” the War Department official said. “When Trump fired the military’s top lawyers the rest saw the writing on the wall, and instead of being a critical firebreak they are now a rubber stamp complicit in this crime.”
The high-ranking Pentagon official is correct in that the strikes against boats in international waters are criminal attacks on civilians.
But the killing of survivors of such strikes is more than that. It is undoubtedly a war crime.
Hegseth’s order to kill survivors was clearly illegal. It was the duty of the soldiers in the line of command to reject the order. That they have not done so but followed the order is in itself a war crime.
How do we know this?
Because the Department of Defense’s LAW OF WAR MANUAL (LOWM) (pdf) says so:
18.3 DUTIES OF INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS OF THE ARMED FORCES
Each member of the armed services has a duty to: (1) comply with the law of war in good faith; and (2) refuse to comply with clearly illegal orders to commit violations of the law of war.
Further down the Manual uses the exact case in question, an order to kill survivors at sea, as an example of an illegal order:
18.3.2 Refuse to Comply With Clearly Illegal Orders to Commit Law of War Violations.
Members of the armed forces must refuse to comply with clearly illegal orders to commit law of war violations. In addition, orders should not be construed to authorize implicitly violations of law of war.18.3.2.1 Clearly Illegal Orders to Commit Law of War Violations.
The requirement to refuse to comply with orders to commit law of war violations applies to orders to perform conduct that is clearly illegal or orders that the subordinate knows, in fact, are illegal. For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.27
Every soldier down the line of command, from the commanding general receiving Hegseth’s verbal order down to the guys who pushed the button to launch the missile had the duty to reject the order. Those who have not done so are themselves guilty.
The footnote in 18.3.2.1 points to the case of the Canadian hospital ship HMHS Llandovery Castle which on 27 June 1918 had been torpedoed by a German U-Boot:
The sinking was the deadliest Canadian naval disaster of the war. 234 doctors, nurses, members of the Canadian Army Medical Corps, soldiers and seamen died in the sinking and subsequent machine-gunning of lifeboats.
In 1921 a German court sentenced two officers to years in prison because they had followed the illegal order of the submarine’s captain, Helmut Brümmer-Patzig, to kill the survivors.
According to the footnote in the LoWM the court said:
“It is certainly to be urged in favor of the military subordinates, that they are under no obligation to question the order of their superior officer, and they can count upon its legality. But no such confidence can be held to exist, if such an order is universally known to everybody, including also the accused, to be without any doubt whatever against the law. This happens only in rare and exceptional cases. But this case was precisely one of them, for in the present instance, it was perfectly clear to the accused that killing defenceless people in the life-boats could be nothing else but a breach of the law. As naval officers by profession they were well aware, as the naval expert Saalwiachter has strikingly stated, that one is not legally authorized to kill defenceless people. They well knew that this was the case here. They quickly found out the facts by questioning the occupants in the boats when these were stopped. They could only have gathered, from the order given by Patzig, that he wished to make use of his subordinates to carry out a breach of the law. They should, therefore, have refused to obey.”
It can not be more clear. The DoD’s Law of Warfare manual is using the case of killing survivors at sea as an example of an illegal order. Today the court would say:
“They could only have gathered, from the order given by Hedseth, that he wished to make use of his subordinates to carry out a breach of the law. They should, therefore, have refused to obey.”
There are signs that one commanding officer did his duty and refused to execute Hegseth’s illegal order. On October 16 the U.S. military attacked another, the sixth, vessel. Two of the four people on board survived and were rescued:
President Trump said that the two survivors of a U.S. military strike Thursday on a vessel in the Caribbean Sea will be returned to their countries of origin.
…
One survivor is from Ecuador and the other is from Colombia.Thursday’s strike marks the sixth known boat attack in the area since last month — and the first known attack with survivors. Mr. Trump said the strike was against a submarine carrying mostly fentanyl and other illegal narcotics.
…
A Navy helicopter transported the survivors from the semi-submersible to a Navy ship, a source familiar with the matter confirmed to CBS News on Friday.“It is the custom of the sea to save people who are at risk in international waters. You don’t sort of sail on. That’s against every principle of naval activity,” Eugene R. Fidell, a senior research scholar at Yale Law School, told CBS News on Friday. “You’re supposed to save people, even though the people here are people who are only in danger because the U.S. was attempting to kill them.”
On the very same day those survivors were rescued, October 16, the DoD announced that the head of its Southern Command was ‘stepping down’:
The military commander overseeing the Pentagon’s escalating attacks against boats in the Caribbean Sea that the Trump administration says are smuggling drugs is stepping down, three U.S. officials said Thursday.
The officer, Adm. Alvin Holsey, is leaving his job as head of the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees all operations in Central and South America, even as the Pentagon has rapidly built up some 10,000 forces in the region in what it says is a major counterdrug and counterterrorism mission.
It was unclear why Holsey is leaving now, less than a year into his tenure, and in the midst of the biggest operation in his 37-year career. But one of the U.S. officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters, said that Holsey had raised concerns about the mission and the attacks on the alleged drug boats.
It now seems clear that Admiral Holsey got fired for not following Hegseth’s illegal order and for ordering the rescue of the survivors of the strike.
Hegseth meanwhile reveals himself as veritable psychopath:
Pete Hegseth @PeteHegseth – 0:37 UTC · Dec 1, 2025
For your Christmas wish list…
@U.S. Southern Command
There are signs that Congress is waking up to the issue (archived) and that Hegseth’s order may well have real consequences for him:
A top Republican and Democrats in Congress suggested on Sunday that American military officials might have committed a war crime in President Trump’s offensive against boats in the Caribbean after a news report said that during one such attack, a follow-up strike was ordered to kill survivors.
…
The lawmakers’ comments came after top Republicans and Democrats on the two congressional committees overseeing the Pentagon vowed over the weekend to increase their scrutiny of U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean after the report. Mr. Turner said the [Washington Post] article had only sharpened lawmakers’ already grave questions about the operation.
The senators and member of congress should grow a spine and use their power over the budget to reign in the president. The secretary of defense must be fired from his position. Admiral Holsey must be reinstate as Southern Command.