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Pete Hegseth’s office is located on the third floor of the Pentagon, in the E ring, room 3E880, facing the Potomac River with a scenic view of the monuments and the Capitol. He posted a video on 5 September showing a new bronze plaque being affixed to his door reading: “Pete Hegseth Secretary of War.”
His splendid new designation, not established by the Congress as required by law, was purely notional and performative, announced by Donald Trump in an executive order that carried no legal weight, but befitted Hegseth’s self-conceit as warrior-in-chief. He now had the title to go with the tattoos: the crusader cross; “Deus vult”, or “God wills it”, the crusader battle cry; the sniper rifle against the background of an American flag; and the cross and sword inspired by Matthew 10:34: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
Three days earlier, on 2 September, he was reported to have given a verbal order for a drone strike against two unidentified men desperately hanging on to the smoking pieces of their shattered boat in the Caribbean after nine members of their crew had already been blasted. “Kill everybody,” was the order, according to the Washington Post on 28 November. It was the first of 21 strikes that the Pentagon states have so far killed 82 people who are said to have been “narco-terrorists”, though their identities are unknown. Hegseth denied knowledge of the second strike.
The day after, Donald Trump posted a video of the strike blowing up the small boat. Hegseth appeared on Fox News to promote the attack and show the video. “That was definitely not artificial intelligence. I watched it live,” he boasted.
Hegseth’s account was the first in a series of constantly shifting stories, accompanied by his refusal to provide senators and House members with information for months, followed by rounds of finger-pointing from Trump and Hegseth about who gave the order or knew about it, and accusations of scapegoating claiming Adm Frank M “Mitch” Bradley, in charge of Special Operations, was being set up to take the fall. Bradley would later say that he gave the order.
The question of whether Hegseth had committed a criminal act was immediately raised in response to the Post report in a statement issued on 29 November by the Former Jags Working Group, which “unanimously considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both. Our group was established in February 2025 in response to SECDEF’s firing of the Army and Air Force Judge Advocates General and his systematic dismantling of the military’s legal guardrails. Had those guardrails been in place, we are confident they would have prevented these crimes.”
Once the Former Jags Working Group published its statement, which included a detailed legal brief concluding that “anyone who issues or follows such orders can and should be prosecuted for war crimes, murder, or both”, the video released earlier, on 18 November, by six Democratic members of Congress, all former military or intelligence officers, which discussed the legal obligation of military service members to refuse unlawful orders, was thrown into high relief. Trump had accused them of “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!,” though he later claimed he was “not threatening death”.
Hegseth called them the “Seditious Six” and announced an FBI investigation targeting the senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat from Arizona, a former combat navy captain and astronaut. “So ‘Captain’ Kelly,” sneered Hegseth in a tweet, “not only did your sedition video intentionally undercut good order & discipline…but you can’t even display your uniform correctly. Your medals are out of order & rows reversed. When/if you are recalled to active duty, it’ll start with a uniform inspection.” With his derision, Hegseth launched himself into face-to-face combat with a genuine war hero, at least on X.
Four days later, the Post story appeared, cascading into a full-blown scandal with potentially severe legal consequences for all involved. When Hegseth was dubbed “secretary of war”, no mere “secretary of defense”, he was confident he was on the offensive at last – against “sedition” – but the boat strikes landed him in a quagmire that is the apotheosis of his “warrior ethos”.
In 2021, Maj Hegseth of the US National Guard’s individual ready reserve was effectively drummed out of the service when officers identified him as an “insider threat” connected to extremist causes. He was branded for his tattoos, which he said “was unfair”. His resentment was raw. “Twenty years … and the military I loved, I fought for. I revered … spit me out,” he wrote in his cri de coeur, The War on Warriors. “While I was writing this book, I separated from an Army that didn’t want me anymore. The feeling was mutual – I didn’t want this Army anymore either.”
Hegseth thought of himself fighting a new war against the “elites” who had stigmatized and isolated him. “Our ‘elites’ are like the feckless drug-addled businessmen at Nakatomi Plaza, looking down on Bruce Willis’ John McClane in Die Hard,” he wrote. “But there will come a day when they realize they need John McClane – that in fact their ability to live in peace and prosperity has always depended on guys like him being honorable, powerful, and deadly.” The “elites” were weaklings in a self-induced haze, while he was the strong and sober one, the killer they did not know they needed to save them.
War crimes, particularly avoiding being held to account for them, have been the great defining cause of Hegseth’s career. Referring to the Geneva conventions against war crimes, Hegseth wrote that US soldiers “should not fight by rules written by dignified men in mahogany rooms eighty years ago”. In his book, he recounted his contempt for being briefed in Iraq by a Jag officer giving guidance about the rules of engagement, referring to the Jags as “jagoffs”. His company, Charlie company, took the name “Kill company”, and posted a whiteboard with the number of kills, the “kill board”, which tallied up dead civilians. Hegseth defended the commanding officer, who “did cross the line at certain times”, but was “an American hero and a trained warrior”, to the New Yorker in 2009.
Hegseth attracted Trump’s attention after he was promoted to co-host of Fox & Friends in 2018. Off the set, his life was chaotic, but his behavior was also responsible for his rise. He had been favored with airtime while having a relationship with its executive producer, Jennifer Rauchet, whom he impregnated. He was also accused of sexually assaulting a woman at a conservative conference in California, which he denied and the local police did not substantiate, and to whom he paid a $50,000 settlement. After his second divorce, he would eventually marry the producer.
On air, he was a strident advocate for the pardoning of three men convicted or accused of war crimes. Army Lt Clint Lorance had been convicted of second-degree murder for ordering his troops to fire on three unarmed Afghan men. Green Beret Maj Mathew Golsteyn was accused of killing an unarmed Afghan man he had detained and of burning his body. On Fox & Friends, Hegseth said: “If he committed premeditated murder then I did as well … Put us all in jail.”
Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher in particular had become a martyr figure among the Maga faithful. The charges against him described especially gruesome behavior. He was accused of stabbing a 17-year-old captive fighter in the neck, posing with him before the killing and his body afterward for a video and photos. Gallagher was also charged with shooting civilians, including an elderly man and a young girl, which he denied. Ultimately, Gallagher was convicted only of posing with the corpse. Hegseth lobbied for his and the others’ pardons, and featured Gallagher and Golsteyn, his band of brothers, on an hour-long special on Fox called Modern Warriors, where he touted Gallagher as a “war hero”. Trump granted three acts of clemency on 15 November 2019, the success of Hegseth’s advocacy.
During Hegseth’s confirmation hearing, his disorderly life was turned inside out, making the process into a soap opera featuring stories about his alleged alcoholism, which he called “anonymous smears”, accusations of sexual misconduct and his mother’s note stating he was “an abuser of women”, though she later said he was “a changed man”. He promised that if confirmed, he would not drink. But some senators homed in on his view on war crimes. In response, Hegseth attacked “politically correct and overbearing rules”, and said that he would make sure that “lawyers aren’t getting in the way”. When the senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat on the armed services committee, asked him about his vulgar remark about Jags as “jagoffs”, Hegseth offered his definition of “a Jag officer who puts his or her own priorities in front of the warfighters, their promotions, their medals, in front of having the backs of those are making the tough calls on the frontlines”.
Shortly after assuming office, Hegseth fired the senior lawyers for the army, navy and air force without cause or performance reviews, and ordered hundreds of Jags to report to the justice department, removing them from their duties advising commanders on the laws of war and instead assigning them to work mainly on immigration issues. Eventually, some of them created the Former Jags Working Group.
In March, Hegseth used a group chat on the Signal messaging service to coordinate an airstrike against the Houthis in Yemen. On Signal, Hegseth texted detailed battle plans, down to the aircraft that would be involved, the timing of missile strikes and targets. Then national security adviser Michael Waltz inadvertently included in the chat the editor of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, who listened in to the operation and published the texts of the real-time internal exchanges. Hegseth slammed Goldberg as a “deceitful” journalist who “peddles in garbage”. Hegseth vehemently denied that the information he shared on the chat was classified, but the Pentagon’s inspector general found that he had violated security and endangered troops, sending “sensitive, nonpublic, operational information” on his private cellphone, in a report that dropped on 4 December, amid the uproar over the boat strikes.
Hegseth cleared the path for those strikes by forcing out the head of the Southern Command, four-star Adm Alvin Holsey, who, while supportive of interdicting drugs, raised serious questions about the legality of lethal attacks. “You’re either on the team or you’re not. When you get an order, you move out fast and don’t ask questions,” Hegseth told Holsey, the Wall Street Journal reported, based on notes from a participant in the meetings. Holsey resigned after less than a year in his post, “a de facto ouster”.
Four weeks after the first attack, on 28 September, Hegseth assembled military leaders from their posts around the globe to hear him expostulate on his doctrine. “We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy,” he told them. “We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement … just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters. You kill people and break things for a living.” His further precepts included “no more beardos” and “fat generals”, and essentially eliminating women from combat roles. “It will also mean that weak men won’t qualify because we’re not playing games. This is combat. This is life or death,” he said. He lectured the commanders: “If the words I’m speaking today are making your heart sink, then you should do the honorable thing and resign.”
The story of Holsey’s resignation had not yet been reported publicly. Hegseth’s warning to the senior military leaders either to follow his orders without question or resign was an oblique but obvious reference to Holsey. The generals and admirals would certainly have known the circumstances for the abrupt resignation of the head of the Southern Command. Their response to Hegseth’s performance was stone silence.
On the day the Washington Post story broke, Hegseth defiantly posted on his X site: “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.” Two days later, on 30 November, he posted a cartoon depiction of a popular children’s figure in books and a Canadian TV series, Franklin the Turtle, who inhabits a gentle world that provides lessons for preschoolers. In Hegseth’s version, under the heading, A Classic Franklin Story: Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists, Franklin is wearing a helmet and flak jacket and has an American flag tattoo on his arm, and stands on the runner of a helicopter and smiles as he wields a bazooka to shoot missiles at open boats. Hegseth added a caption: “For your Christmas wish list…” Franklin the Turtle had been transformed into the icon of Hegseth’s “warrior ethos”. But the cartoon was also Hegseth’s projection of himself. He had gone from John McClane in Die Hard to a death-dealing Franklin the Turtle.
On 2 December, seated next to Trump in a cabinet meeting, Hegseth offered his latest convoluted explanation. “I watched that first strike live,” he said. “As you can imagine at the Department of War, we got a lot of things to do. So I didn’t stick around for the hour and two hours or whatever where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs. So I moved on to my next meeting.” While he had more important things to do, he said, he learned “hours later” that Bradley had made the “correct decision to ultimately sink the boat … .” Hegseth added: “We have his back.”
Hegseth did not stop talking, but babbled on: “I did not personally see survivors, but I stand – because the thing was on fire. That was exploded and fire or smoke, you can’t see anything. You got digital. This is called the fog of war.”
Even then, he would not stop talking. “This is what you and the press don’t understand,” he said. “You sit in your air-conditioned offices or up on Capitol Hill and you nitpick and you plant fake stories in the Washington Post … .” Meaning he was the victim of a conspiracy.
But in his attempt to mount his defense, Hegseth had misstated the precept of the Prussian theorist of war, Carl von Clausewitz, to whom “the fog of war” is attributed. By “fog”, von Clausewitz meant the rapid obsolescence of the original war plan when confronted with the “uncertainty” of battle. About the missile strikes killing 82 men in open boats, including the two adrift in the ocean, however, there was no “uncertainty”.
On 4 December, a bipartisan congressional group viewed the video of the 2 September attack for the first time. The representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, emerged to state: “What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service … You have two individuals and clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, were killed by the United States.”
Himes also revealed that Bradley had testified that “there had not been a ‘kill them all’ order, and that there was not an order to grant no quarter”. The admiral took the responsibility onto himself, placing himself in potential jeopardy. But Bradley’s statement did not settle the larger issue of whether the whole mission itself and the killing of 82 people so far is a “war crime, murder, or both”, under the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, or both. The Democrats who witnessed the video called for its public release and Hegseth’s dismissal. Some Republicans defended the attack – the senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas called it “righteous”.
The first trial for war crimes after the second world war involved the killing of survivors of an attack at sea. On 13 March 1945, a Nazi U-boat, U-852, sank a Greek steamer, the Peleus. Twelve merchant seamen survived, clinging to rafts and debris. The commander, Kapitänleutnant (Lt) Heinz Eck, ordered them to be killed. Three men ultimately survived to tell the tale. U-852 was captured by the Royal Navy on 2 May. Eck and his officers were tried under a British military war crimes court from 17 to 20 October 1945, just weeks before the Nuremberg international tribunal began its proceedings. Eck’s defense was that his action was an “operational necessity”. His officers said they were following orders. On 30 November, Eck and two of his officers were executed by firing squad.
“What do you think of firing squads?” Trump ruminated to some advisers before the 2024 election. He “mused about the possibility of creating a flashy, government-backed video-ad campaign that would accompany a federal revival of these execution methods”, according to a report in Rolling Stone. “In Trump’s vision, these videos would include footage from these new executions, if not from the exact moments of death.”
But before the blindfold and the last cigarette at the wall, the solution might just be pardons or clemency, like those Hegseth lobbied for for Eddie Gallagher and the others, vindication in his eyes of accused war criminals as war heroes.
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Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist
