But I also know why those rules exist — and it’s becoming terrifyingly clear that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth does not.
The law of armed conflict isn’t humanitarian sentimentality imposed by lawyers who’ve never seen combat. It’s practical doctrine forged over centuries of warfare, codified in the Geneva Conventions by nations that understood a fundamental truth: How they fight determines whether peace is possible afterward, and whether their own troops come home alive.
The International Committee of the Red Cross states it plainly: The law of armed conflict exists “to provide protection for the victims of conflict and to lay down rules for the conduct of military operations.” But here’s what they also emphasize: “The law protects you and is binding on you.”
Those rules protect us. They protect the soldier who might be captured, the commander who must maintain discipline, and the nation that wants to claim moral authority on the world stage.
When American forces capture enemy combatants, we treat them according to the Geneva Conventions not because we’re soft, but because we expect the same treatment for our own troops — and because discipline distinguishes a professional military from a murder gang with matching uniforms.
I remember what Iraqi insurgents did to Americans they captured. I remember soldiers from the 507th Maintenance Company ambushed in Nasiriyah in 2003 — beaten, paraded on Al Jazeera. Forensic evidence later showed that one American sergeant was executed with two gunshot wounds to the back after being captured.
I remember what happened to two soldiers captured at a checkpoint in June 2006. Their bodies were later found booby-trapped with IEDs. An Iraqi general described them as “killed in a very brutal way and tortured.” The details that emerged were medieval: One soldier’s captors cut out his eye and tongue before beating him to death. They set his corpse on fire. The other was beheaded, his severed head displayed in a propaganda video.
This is what can happen when combatants don’t recognize the laws of war.
And now we have a secretary of defense who, according to The Washington Post, issued a verbal directive before a Sept. 2 strike in the Caribbean that the mission “was to kill everybody” aboard an alleged drug vessel. When two survivors were spotted clinging to wreckage after the initial strike, Admiral Frank Bradley — then commanding Joint Special Operations Command — ordered a second strike. The stated justification: to destroy the vessel as a hazard to navigation.
Geneva Conventions and Department of Defense policy state unambiguously: Shipwreck survivors are protected people. Combatants cannot strike a vessel when doing so will kill people clinging to the wreckage.
The administration’s defense rests on operational ambiguity: Hegseth gave the overarching directive, but Bradley made the tactical call. Hegseth now cites the “fog of war” and says he didn’t personally see survivors before the second strike.
But this parsing misses the point. When the secretary of defense establishes “kill everybody” as the mission objective, commanders down the chain act accordingly. That’s how command authority works. The legal and moral responsibility doesn’t evaporate if Hegseth wasn’t watching the screen at the precise moment survivors appeared, or because the second strike was nominally aimed at the vessel rather than the men holding onto it.
Hegseth’s disdain for legal constraints on warfare isn’t new. It’s been his brand for years.
During Trump’s first term, Hegseth lobbied the president to pardon an Army lieutenant convicted by a military court in 2013 for ordering his soldiers to open fire on unarmed Afghan civilians. Nine members of the officer’s own platoon testified against him at trial. Hegseth also championed a Navy SEAL platoon leader accused by members of his own platoon of stabbing a teenage ISIS prisoner to death while the boy was receiving medical treatment, then posing for photographs with the corpse. Fellow SEALs described their leader as “freaking evil” and “toxic.”
These weren’t warriors being persecuted by politically correct bureaucrats. Their own comrades reported their conduct as criminal. Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island and Army veteran, noted during Hegseth’s confirmation hearing: “They did their duty as soldiers to report war crimes.”
In 2016, Hegseth told a conservative forum that American troops shouldn’t follow unlawful orders. “If you’re doing something that is just completely unlawful and ruthless, then there is a consequence for that,” he said. “That’s why the military said it won’t follow unlawful orders from their commander in chief.”
He continued: “There’s a standard, there’s an ethos, there’s a belief that we are above so many things that our enemies or others would do.”
Nine years later, six Democratic lawmakers — all military or intelligence veterans — released a video making essentially the same point. Hegseth called it “despicable, reckless, and false.” The Pentagon announced an investigation into Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat from Arizona and retired Navy captain and astronaut, under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
When the 2016 video resurfaced, Kelly responded on social media: “Pete Hegseth says he’s going to court-martial me for saying the same exact thing he said 9 years ago. What changed for Pete? Well to start, he spends all day thinking about how he can suck up to Trump.”
The Former JAGs Working Group — retired military lawyers who served as legal advisors across the armed forces — issued a statement last week, saying it “considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both.”
But this isn’t just about legal liability. It’s about what kind of military the United States wants to have.
The consequences of Hegseth’s actions will fall on the troops he claims to champion. If they are given potentially illegal orders, soldiers will have to decide whether to risk insubordination and punishment for refusing, or go ahead and expose themselves to potential prosecution and imprisonment.
Upholding the laws of war isn’t weakness. It’s what makes America worth fighting for. When we abandon these laws, we become indistinguishable from the enemies I spent years fighting.
These laws are what give our captured troops any hope of humane treatment. They’re what allow us to look at ourselves in the mirror when we come home.
Hegseth never learned that lesson. And now he’s teaching the opposite to the entire US military.
He should be held accountable. Not because lawyers demand it. Because every soldier who ever served under the laws of armed conflict — and expected those same laws to protect them if the unthinkable happened — demands it.
