The knives are out for the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. The leaks from the Pentagon about him will continue until Hegseth is gone.
The officers do not want a boss who is giving illegal orders while scapegoating the generals and soldiers who follow them:
At the White House on Monday, Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, read a statement that said Mr. Hegseth had authorized the Special Operations commander overseeing the attack, Adm. Frank M. Bradley, “to conduct these kinetic strikes.”
She said that Admiral Bradley had “worked well within his authority and the law directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated.”
Bradly gets pushed forward to take the beating while Hegseth and Trump claim innocence:
Bradley will have the chance to address outstanding issues about the strikes when he speaks with lawmakers Thursday behind closed doors. Some lawmakers have said the Trump administration appears to be making Bradley into something of a scapegoat.
“Looks like they’re throwing him under the bus,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), often a critic of the administration, “but these kinds of decisions go all the way to the top.”
Adm. Bradley had the poor choice of following an illegal order or getting fired.
In my recent piece abut U.S. strikes on boats in the Caribbean I suggested that the head of Southern Command, Adm. Alvin Holsey, was made to retire because he rejected orders to kill survivors of U.S attacks:
On the very same day those survivors were rescued, October 16, the DoD announced that the head of its Southern Command was ‘stepping down’: ..
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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.
A piece in today’s Wall Street Journal confirms this impression:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shocked official Washington in mid-October when he announced that the four-star head of U.S. military operations in the Caribbean was retiring less than a year into his tenure.
But according to two Pentagon officials, Hegseth asked Adm. Alvin Holsey to step down, a de facto ouster that was the culmination of months of discord between Hegseth and the officer. It began days after President Trump’s inauguration in January and intensified months later when Holsey had initial concerns about the legality of lethal strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, according to former officials aware of the discussions.
Hegseth has now claimed (archived) to have not seen no survivors when he was in the room watching the stream of a second strike happening that killed survivors of an allegedly smuggling boat:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday that “a couple of hours” passed before he was made aware that a September military strike he authorized and “watched live” required an additional attack to kill two survivors, further distancing himself from an incident now facing congressional inquiry.
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“I did not personally see survivors,” he said in response to a reporter’s question, “… because that thing was on fire and was exploded, and fire, smoke, you can’t see anything. You got digital, there’s — this is called the fog of war.”
That, however, contradicts the original reporting of the issue. The Washington Post wrote (archived) that Hegseth was watching the video stream when survivors of a strike were clearly visible and was aware of the order to kill them:
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 NY Times reports further details (archived):
Before the Trump administration began attacking people suspected of smuggling drugs at sea, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth approved contingency plans for what to do if an initial strike left survivors, according to multiple U.S. officials.
The military would attempt to rescue survivors who appeared to be helpless, shipwrecked and out of what the administration considered a fight. But it would try again to kill them if they took what the United States deemed to be a hostile action, like communicating with suspected cartel members, the officials said.
After the smoke cleared from a first strike on Sept. 2, there were two survivors, and one of them radioed for help, the U.S. officials said. Adm. Frank M. Bradley, who commanded the operation, ordered a follow-up strike and both were killed.
The reasoning is ludicrous. Survivors of a murderous strike are to be rescued. But survivors who call for help to be rescued have to be killed:
Under the plans Mr. Hegseth had approved, Admiral Bradley interpreted the purported communications between the initial survivors and colleagues as meaning that the survivors were still in the fight, rather than shipwrecked and helpless people whom it would be a war crime to target.
The whole legal construct behind these strikes is obviously nonsense:
The Pentagon’s defense of its actions rests heavily on the premise that there was a “fight” in the first place. In defending the campaign of summary killings at sea as lawful, the administration has relied on Mr. Trump’s disputed determination that the United States is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels and that people suspected of smuggling drugs for them are “combatants.”
A still-secret memo by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel accepts Mr. Trump’s claims about the nature of drug cartels and that there is an armed conflict. Based on that premise, it concludes that the boat strikes are lawful.
One of its key related conclusions, according to people who have read it, is that suspected cargos of drugs aboard boats are lawful military targets because cartels could otherwise sell them and use the profits to buy military equipment to sustain their alleged war efforts.
The Pentagon’s emphasis on the purported radio communications appears to rely on that logic. The idea appears to be that without a second strike, another boat could have come to retrieve not only the survivors but also any of the alleged shipment of cocaine that the first blast did not burn up, so calling for help was a hostile act.
The OLC memo is intentionally confusing cause and effect.
People and cartels are greedy. They sell drugs to make money. Whatever arms they may have are used in support of that primary aim. They are in business, not in an ‘armed conflict’. They do not to fight wars for lebensraum or ideologically reasons:
A broad range of legal experts reject the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s claim that this is an armed conflict. They say that there is no armed conflict, that crews of boats suspected of smuggling drugs are civilians, not combatants, and that Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth have been giving illegal orders to commit murder.
Hegseth has given orders to murder civilians. If this were an ‘armed conflict’ Hegseth would have committed a war crime.
Or, as conservative commentator George Will scathingly remarks (archived:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.
Pete Hegseth has long argued for more brutal wars, for more unfair fights to satisfy his inner psychopath:
In books and on television, Hegseth argued for years that U.S. military leaders should relax rules for American forces, allowing them to fight unburdened by concerns of future courts-martial. More freedom to operate, he insisted, and less regulation by military lawyers would make troops more lethal and effective, and could be justified under the laws of war.
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Hegseth’s views were shaped by his own experience in the Army. He was deployed to Iraq in 2005, in the northern city of Samarra, which was a counterinsurgency hotbed. The regiment’s Charlie Company, which included Hegseth, employed such aggressive tactics that it was referred to by some soldiers as the Kill Company [archived]. Four of its soldiers were later court-martialed on charges of killing unarmed Iraqis. Three of them were convicted; one case was thrown out on appeal.Hegseth has cited a JAG briefing on “legal and proper engagement” that he says he and fellow troops received when they deployed. Hegseth says his soldiers were told they couldn’t fire on an armed man unless it was clear he posed a threat.
Hegseth pulled his platoon aside and told them to ignore the legal advice. “I will not allow that nonsense to filter into your brains,” he says he told them, according to his 2024 book “The War on Warriors.” “Men, if you see an enemy who you believe is a threat, you engage and destroy the threat.”
Hegseth brought such convictions to the Pentagon. In February, when he fired the top JAGs, he said they could be potential “roadblocks” to lawful orders “given by a commander in chief.”
Defense Secretary Hegseth’s inherent brutality is likely the reason why he got hired for his position:
Trump selected Hegseth as defense secretary partly because of his views on loosening the rules of engagement, two people familiar with the presidential transition said.
It is high time for Congress to rein both men in.