Hegseth’s Decadeslong Quest to Rewrite the Rules of Engagement

 Pete Hegseth built a national profile defending troops accused of violating the laws of armed conflict, a trait that won over President Trump in his first term and put him atop the Pentagon in his second.

But the defense secretary who has complained about “stupid rules of engagement” is now at the center of a Washington debate about whether a September strike against a suspected drug boat in the Caribbean amounts to a war crime, testing Hegseth’s standing with lawmakers and his leadership of the military.

The controversy was a long time coming.

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.

“Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct,” Hegseth said in September during a rebranding event of the Defense Department to the Department of War.

It was a worldview shaped by his deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan as a soldier in the National Guard, where he told his platoon to ignore legal advice on rules of engagement he considered “nonsense.” He persuaded Trump in his first term to pardon Army First Lt. Clint Lorance and Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, both implicated in the death of unarmed Afghans, and to reverse the demotion of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who was accused of killing a wounded ISIS prisoner and ultimately was convicted only of posing for photos with the corpse.

“Rules of engagement are a huge problem, as you know,” Hegseth said on a podcast last November, as Trump was considering his nomination. “All they do is take one incident and yell ‘war criminal.’”

Hegseth’s views once again have become relevant as he defends himself against the charge, from lawmakers of both parties and law-of-war experts, that he bears some responsibility for the Sept. 2 strike.

Many of the details of the attacks, which killed 11 in what was the first of 21 strikes that the Pentagon says killed 82 people total, have yet to be made clear.

Hegseth said during a cabinet meeting Tuesday that he never ordered Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley, a special operations commander, to carry out the second strike that destroyed the boat and killed two survivors, though he defended the officer’s actions. Hegseth didn’t explain why the U.S. made no effort to spare the survivors in September but rescued and repatriated two survivors from Ecuador and Colombia following a strike on a semi-submersible drug vessel a month later.

A senior administration official said in the September attack, the U.S. struck the boat twice in the initial attack, and twice more in the second.

While lawmakers and experts debate whether the boat strikes are legal, the death of the two survivors clinging to the boat’s wreckage raises special concern because the Defense Department Law of War Manual makes clear that the deliberate killing of a shipwrecked crew would be unlawful.

“Persons who have been rendered unconscious or otherwise incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck, such that they are no longer capable of fighting, are hors de combat,” the manual reads, using a term for people clearly rendered out of action.

Even if the goal of the second strike was to complete the destruction of the vessel, the military would need to take the fate of the two survivors into account before attacking again, law-of-war experts say. The survivors could have been rescued and apprehended, for example, before the boat was sunk.

While Hegseth says he is bringing a long-needed “warrior ethos” to a Pentagon that he says elevated diversity over hard-nosed military capability, his critics say his decision in February to fire top Judge Advocates General for the military services and his arguments against strict constraints on the use of force has created an atmosphere in which abuses can occur.

“American officers are highly professional and very proud of the fact that they are operating within the rule of law,” said Frank Kendall, who served as the Air Force secretary during the Biden administration. “Hegseth has been consistently undermining that fundamental professional value.”

Sen. Jim Justice, a West Virginia Republican, applauded Hegseth’s overall approach to the Pentagon this week, while adding that he was troubled by the decision to carry out a second strike on the alleged drug boat. “I think he’s a warrior,” Justice said. “I think he’s absolutely the right choice to be leading our military.”

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. Hegseth, over the course of conversations and television appearances, persuaded Trump that troops such as Gallagher were unfairly targeted for being tough on the enemy. Trump told Hegseth during an interview for Pentagon chief that he wanted troops to act without fear that lawyers would be looking over their shoulder, the people said.

Trump had already echoed Hegseth’s language ahead of those discussions. “We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!” he tweeted in October 2019, tagging Hegseth. A year later, he pardoned four Blackwater contractors convicted in the 2007 Nisour Square massacre in Iraq for whom Hegseth had advocated on his show.

But the questions about the use of force in the September strike pertain not only to Hegseth and Bradley but to other military officers in the chain of command, including the legal advisers who are supposed to ensure that the use of force is lawful.

Speaking at the cabinet meeting, Hegseth said he watched the first September strike as it happened from the Pentagon, but didn’t see the second strike or immediately know about the two survivors.

He defended Bradley, saying the admiral had made “the correct decision” after giving him full authorization to conduct the strikes. Alluding to his pre-Pentagon days, Hegseth noted that he had written “a whole book” about restrictions he said had been placed unnecessarily on warfighters. Trump “has empowered commanders, commanders to do what is necessary, which is dark and difficult things in the dead of night on behalf of the American people,” Hegseth added, referring to the use of military force in the counterdrug campaign.

But Hegseth’s remarks left many questions about the incident.

“What was so urgent about the second strike at that moment?” asked Geoffrey Corn, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who was the service’s senior law-of-war adviser in 2004 and 2005. “It’s not like it was a hostile ship that was firing on us,” added Corn, who is now a law professor at Texas Tech University. “If the boat was deemed to be a threat to navigation, then fine, go rescue the survivors and then sink it.”

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. 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 to orders “given by a commander in chief.”