The U.S. Navy’s accidental killing of as many as 170 Iranian schoolgirls last month and the apparent war crime in the Caribbean last year against shipwrecked suspected drug traffickers both took place under the leadership and responsibility of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. And they did not take place in a vacuum.
I served in Iraq in 2006-07 as a CIA case officer. One of my sources reported from an area within the territory of the 101st Airborne Division. Then-Lt. Pete Hegseth served with that division at that time, as a mobilized National Guardsman performing civil affairs duties. In the widening gyre of Iraq back then, the CIA needed assistance from military units, and the 101st regularly provided support during my source meetings: They kept a unit on standby in case something went wrong during an operation. I appreciated that backup, and I preface what I’m about to say by emphasizing how much I respect that unit. But another aspect of that division’s legacy from its 2005-06 tour was two infamous war crimes.
On March 12, 2006, soldiers from the 2nd Brigade of the 101st kidnapped and gang-raped a 14-year-old girl near Mahmoudiyah and murdered her, her parents, and her 6-year-old sister to cover up the crime. Four soldiers, one of whom faced the death penalty, received sentences of up to 110 years for this crime.
That’s terrible enough. But al-Qaeda in Iraq seized upon this atrocity to curry favor with the local populace. In direct retaliation, al-Qaeda attacked three enlisted soldiers from the same company—good men, innocent of any crime—killing one on the spot and kidnapping two others.
The military’s declaration that the service members were “duty status—whereabouts unknown” set off an immediate nationwide search for missing Americans. My trainee desk officer at headquarters begged me to do all I could to find these fine young men in time. I shared her urgency, but we were all too late. The soldiers were found, but not before al-Qaeda tortured and murdered them.
In a separate incident, two soldiers from 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment executed three detainees on May 9, 2006. During Operation Iron Triangle, soldiers misunderstood their brigade commander, Col. Michael Steele (of Blackhawk Down fame), to have given a “no-quarter” order to kill all military-aged males when they raided a Lake Tharthar island known to be occupied by al-Qaeda. Those soldiers received prison sentences, and Steele’s promising career came to an end. Hegseth was assigned to the 3-187th, and undoubtedly knew about both the kidnapped American soldiers and the fallout from Operation Iron Triangle. He knows as well as anyone that war crimes against foreign civilians, evil acts in and of themselves, endanger American service members, too.
The 101st Airborne’s 2005-06 tour in Iraq wasn’t unique in that war crimes took place; e.g., a rifle squad from 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment in Anbar killed 25 Iraqi civilians in Haditha on November 19, 2005. Iraq at that time was something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting of Hell; the depravity of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq organization is something I still find difficult to communicate to civilians.
Hegseth took different lessons from the experience. He used his platform as a Fox News weekend morning personality to defend service members convicted of war crimes. In one of his first acts as secretary, he fired the judge advocates general of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. He reassigned 600 judge advocates (whom he immaturely refers to as “jagoffs”) to civilian immigration law duties. As such, the current crisis over bombing a girls’ school, and the earlier crisis over the Caribbean “double-tap” strike on September 2, 2025, were foreseeable to those who knew Hegseth’s record.
An organization’s tone is set at the top. Our youngest service members cannot help but imbibe the unlawful orders and toxic rhetoric coming from the secretary as he grapples with unresolved personal demons regarding his Iraq tour. The Joint Chiefs sadly stand mute in response to Hegseth’s illegality, vulgarity, and disrespect of the dead, both Iranian and American.
Per military regulation, shipwrecked sailors—“helpless persons in distress at sea”—“must be respected and protected at all times,” and “not be knowingly attacked.” The “shipwrecked shall be treated humanely” and “all possible measures shall be taken, without delay, to search for and collect” them. Hegseth claimed that subordinates acted within orders the secretary gave when they killed the survivors of an airstrike clinging to a capsized boat suspected of facilitating narcotics trafficking.
Any order allowing the military to kill shipwrecked sailors violated U.S. and international laws against either murder or related war crimes. After World War II the Allies convicted, imprisoned, and even executed Axis officers accused of killing shipwrecked seamen. For example, on March 13, 1944, German submarine U-852, under Capt.-Lt. Heinz Eck, sank a Greek cargo steamer, Peleus, in the Atlantic. Eck’s crew machine-gunned and threw grenades at life rafts containing Peleus’ survivors, as well as wreckage that might have supported other sailors. Four Peleus crewmen, including British sailors, survived and were rescued on April 20. On May 2, 1944, the Allies sank U-852 in the Indian Ocean, with Eck among the captured survivors. After conviction at trial on October 20, 1945, British authorities executed Eck and two of his officers. In another example, the commander of a Japanese submarine pleaded guilty to an American court martial and was sentenced to eight years of hard labor after his crew sank three U.K.-flagged merchant ships and killed shipwrecked seamen.
Despite the clear illegality of the strike on shipwrecked sailors, there is no reported discipline of any involved in the September 2 incident. The U.S. now holds itself to a lower law-of-war standard than the Allies held Hitler’s Kriegsmarine. To his credit, Adm. Alvin Holsey of U.S. Southern Command, responsible for Latin America, announced his early retirement after the strike, less than a year into his command, rather than further participate in unlawful operations, which have thus far killed 163 sailors.
In November, six lawmakers who are all military or CIA veterans released a video simply reminding armed service and intelligence community members of their obligation to disobey unlawful orders. Hegseth responded by threatening to recall Sen. Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain, to active duty to court-martial him, while Trump reposted messages calling for these elected officials to be executed. Republican-appointed U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon later stopped Hegseth’s efforts to go after Kelly, and a Washington grand jury unanimously rejected U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s effort to prosecute these senators and congressmen for making an obviously correct statement of law. This “no true bill” was a deserved humiliation for the Justice Department.
The double-tap boat strike and the attempt to punish the veteran legislators set the stage for what came next. On February 28, the first day of the Iran War, Hegseth trumpeted that U.S. forces would not follow “stupid rules of engagement.” That same day, a Navy warship launched a Tomahawk cruise missile that destroyed a girls’ school, easily identified as such through imagery of the adjacent pink-and-blue children’s playground, and other available intelligence collection techniques.
Reporting suggests that the actual cause of this disaster was the Defense Intelligence Agency’s failure to update its targeting package on an Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force naval facility with new imagery from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Center, which would have shown that the building was now a school. We don’t yet know which intelligence officer nominated, which commander approved, and which warship actioned the target. The Pentagon claims that its investigation into this disaster is purportedly still open, but its proximate cause, as lawyers say, is Hegseth’s previous public dismissal of rules of engagement.
Even after killing scores of schoolgirls, Hegseth continues to double down with calls to show “no mercy,” in plain contradiction of the Christian ethics to which he loudly claims fidelity. He wears tattoos of Crusaders’ crosses and mottos, but defies principles of chivalry to which medieval knights gallantly subscribed. (Unfortunately, Crusaders often didn’t live up to these ethics.) Hegseth calls for giving “no quarter” to our enemies, contradicting international laws to which America has subscribed, an order of the exact type that resulted in the murder of detainees, the imprisonment of his colleagues, and the ruin of his commander on Operation Iron Triangle.
There’s a reason no previous defense secretary, 10 of whom saw combat themselves, talked like this. Veterans know that war kills the good and the innocent along with the bad, which leads all I’ve known to express humility and respect about combat losses. Instead, Hegseth’s Pentagon and this White House release juvenile videos conflating real-world combat with movies and video games. The so-called “Department of War” even allowed an image of the dignified transfer of a fallen soldier at Dover Air Force Base to be misappropriated for use in a campaign fundraising solicitation.
Worse, Hegseth’s criminal policies and puerile rhetoric now endanger both his subordinates and American civilians, for four reasons.
First, consider the moral injuries suffered by analysts, targeteers, planners, and sailors who have now killed little girls. Good service members, poorly led by Hegseth, will live with this emotional and spiritual burden for the rest of their lives, with ill effects on them and their families.
Second, the U.S. has lost 13 servicemembers and five aircraft in this Iran campaign so far, and foreign-flagged merchant ships are ablaze in the Gulf. We don’t want shipwrecked American sailors or downed airmen treated the way Captains Eck or Nakagawa treated shipwrecked seamen—nor the way Hegseth treated suspected drug traffickers.
Third, years of counterterrorism experience tell me that the Quds Force and its proxy Lebanese Hezbollah are looking to retaliate for the February 28 strike, probably against American schools in Navy communities. The attacks on a Hebrew school in Michigan by a Hezbollah member’s relative and a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps class at a Virginia university by an Islamic State supporter recently released from prison, are flashing red warnings.
Fourth, Hegseth is hurting our armed forces’ institutional cultures. An organization’s tone is set at the top. Our youngest service members cannot help but imbibe the unlawful orders and toxic rhetoric coming from the secretary as he grapples with unresolved personal demons regarding his Iraq tour. The Joint Chiefs sadly stand mute in response to Hegseth’s illegality, vulgarity, and disrespect of the dead, both Iranian and American.
Back in the 1990s, when I was a lieutenant, Army soldiers used to cheerfully holler “WHOA” as a sort of general affirmative sentiment. My understanding was that this obscure acronym meant “With the honor of America.” Killing shipwrecked sailors and schoolgirls doesn’t reflect America’s honor. The image that Hegseth presents to our fellow citizens and the world, of the glorification of cruelty and undisciplined violence for violence’s sake, doesn’t represent what our military ought to be, nor what our troops—fine young men and women—still are.
