If we’re not better than Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, we’re in terrible trouble.
War always means innocent people dying. But civilized nations try — imperfectly, too often unsuccessfully — to limit that risk. That’s why rules of engagement exist in the first place. They are not about political correctness or bureaucratic caution. They are about preventing needless death.
Hegseth has spent years ridiculing that idea.
Long before he became Donald Trump’s defense secretary, Hegseth built a career attacking the very guardrails meant to keep wars from sliding into indiscriminate violence. As a Fox News personality and conservative activist, he mocked military lawyers who insisted on verifying targets before pulling the trigger. He sneered at the notion that American commanders should exercise caution when civilians might be nearby. He called those rules “stupid.”
Once in power at the Pentagon, he moved quickly to dismantle the culture that produced them.
Hegseth fired the military’s top judge advocates general and shuttered Pentagon offices tasked with reducing civilian casualties. He framed the changes as part of a new “warrior ethos” — a phrase that sounded less like professional military doctrine than something ripped from a locker-room speech.
When the war with Iran began, he boasted that American forces were operating with what he proudly described as “maximum authorities.” No more of the supposedly timid constraints of past conflicts. No more hesitation.
“Death and destruction from the sky all day long,” he said at one briefing.
Those words now hang over the ruins of an elementary school in the Iranian port city of Minab.
According to preliminary findings reported this week, a U.S. strike aimed at an adjacent naval installation likely destroyed the school building, killing roughly 175 civilians, most of them children. Officials familiar with the investigation say the target list relied on outdated intelligence. The school had once been part of the military base years earlier, but had long since been converted to civilian use.
It appears the strike planners simply didn’t double-check.
In the old Pentagon culture Hegseth spent years mocking, double-checking was exactly the point.
The rules he derided existed for reasons that went beyond humanitarian concern. Civilian deaths inflame local populations, alienate allies and create more enemies than they eliminate. Every experienced military commander understands this. It is both a moral obligation and a strategic necessity.
Hegseth, a despicable lout whose moral compass was shattered long ago—if he ever had one—sneers at all that as weakness.
Even before entering government, his public life was defined by conduct that suggested a man who mocked rules — legal, ethical, or otherwise — as inconveniences that applied to other people.
A woman told Monterey, California police in 2017 that after a Republican women’s conference where Hegseth was the keynote speaker, he took her phone, blocked his hotel room door with his body, and sexually assaulted her despite, in her words, saying “no” repeatedly. She went to a hospital, underwent a rape kit exam, and handed her clothing to investigators. No charges were filed, but Hegseth later paid his accuser $50,000 in a confidential settlement. His explanation: he feared what the allegation might do to his Fox News career.
That’s what he told senators, under oath. But despite that and a litany of other horror stories presented by people who knew the real Hegseth, he was confirmed because the Republican majority of the United States Senate wasn’t going to challenge Donald Trump on issues of personal morality.
So today, this depraved man commands the most powerful military force on earth. Should it come as a surprise that he has dismantled every institutional check he can find that was designed to prevent mistakes?
Hegseth is every bit as vile as his recently fired Cabinet colleague, Kristi Noem. But unless he personally wounds Trump’s psyche with an ad campaign, there’s little reason to hope that he’ll meet the same fate.
It’s naive to bemoan that Hegseth doesn’t care about body counts. It’s why he has the job.
His position demands seriousness, restraint, and respect for the traditions of a professional officer corps that has spent generations learning the hard lessons of war. It requires someone who understands that American power is not measured by how eagerly we unleash it.
Instead, it is now held by a man who treated the laws of war as punchlines long before he had the authority to bend them.
At least 150 children are dead in Minab. Their families do not care whether the missile strike was technically legal, whether the intelligence file was outdated, or whether the final investigation assigns blame.
And if we don’t care either, shame on us.
Our current government conflates caution with cowardice. Pete Hegseth called that attitude strength.
History will call it something else.