Pete Hegseth says he is all about the “warrior ethos.”
As a Jewish guy from New Jersey, I am far better equipped to discuss the worrier ethos. This explains why I was from the get-go deeply concerned about Trump appointing a Fox News mannekin to run the Department of Defense. And is now why, if I were Hegseth, I’d be worried about being able to hang on to that job for much longer.
You could tell that Pentagon Pete was going to be a disaster from the start. Having never run anything successfully in his life, he was completely unequipped for the job—one of the toughest in the world. His prior track record in business was, to put it politely, undistinguished; he was coming to the Capitol from the Island of Broken Media Toys where, despite competition that consisted primarily of failed beauty queens and the kind of loudmouthed blowhards you would move far away from at a bar, he had not made the cut to be even a weekday afternoon anchor. No, he handled weekend duties, the equivalent of a military command assignment in Greenland—before it became a cool MAGA tourist destination.
Worse, we already knew what it might all mean if he ever got the kind of power he now has having read his book.
This book, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, essentially lays out why Hegseth had spent a chunk of his career defending and actively advocating on behalf of soldiers who were accused of committing war crimes. It makes clear he feels that international law and the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice were just ‘woke’ obstacles to the murdering and maiming that real killing machines are entitled to once they put on the uniform of the United States.
In fact, one of the first things Hegseth did when he got to his big office on the third floor in the E Ring of the Pentagon was to fire a bunch of the military’s JAG officers—lawyers—whose job it was to keep DoD operations within the bounds of the law.
In the months since assuming his role, Hegseth has been a serial disaster. Some of his greatest hits have included revealing sensitive information about battle plans on a messaging app, alienating many of his own staff to the point that’ve left their posts, banning Defense Department employees from speaking at think tanks in other forums where they could interact with experts and, infamously, convening top military brass to Quantico for a lecture on why they should not have beards.
Oh, and he also happily signed off on President Trump’s efforts to deploy the U.S. military to locations in U.S. cities.
Another place, of course, where massive military assets have been deployed has been the Caribbean, notably off the coast of Venezuela. Never mind that there was neither a war nor a threat to U.S. national security anywhere in the vicinity; Trump has been aching to invade somewhere since before he took office. Greenland, Canada and Panama had all been on the list at one time or another. Hegseth has been happy to play along.
When that plan grew to include sinking small speedboats that were alleged, without evidence, to be carrying drugs, Hegseth was all for it. (Trump, Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Co. have created an elaborate argument that somehow the boats are part of a massive “narco-terrorist” operation linked to Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro, and demand military intervention.) Others, including the combatant commander of the U.S. Southern Command, were not. He quit.
Hegseth, like the White House, has been proudly boasting about the military prowess involved in our war against these powerboats, never mind that it pits relatively tiny vessels against the full might of the U.S. Navy—including a carrier battle group led by the most advanced aircraft carrier in the world, the USS Gerald R. Ford.
The Washington Post has reported Hegseth was so hands-on with these attacks—which have claimed over 80 lives—that when overhead surveillance images following an early strike revealed survivors amid the wreckage, he gave the order to “kill them all.”
The order, and the murders that followed, are precisely the kind of illegal action Democratic lawmakers had warned that U.S. military officers were obligated by law and their oaths not to follow.
Unfortunately for Hegseth, this incident very quickly ceased to be seen as partisan. Republican lawmakers have now joined in calls for investigations into what happened and whether Hegseth really did issue the fatal command.
Trump has denied, in an interview on Air Force One, that this was the case—but also, tellingly, indicated that he wouldn’t have issued the order in question either.
Trump has reportedly considered letting Hegseth go several times over the past year, dating back to the leak of battle intelligence via that Signal group chat with a journalist. Further screw-ups or mounting blowback from the boat attack campaign could very likely lead to a change of leadership atop the Pentagon.
It seems reasonable to anticipate that, given the severity of the crimes involved—and it is important to note that even prior to the “kill them all” order, the attacks on the boats were themselves probably unjustifiable violations of the law—it is almost certain that the heat on Hegseth is indeed going to increase.
Will that happen in the middle of the illegal war with Venezuela that appears to be looming? Perhaps not. But given that invading Venezuela for no defensible reason is also likely to trigger many in Trump’s “America First” base, it also seems likely that Trump, who never assumes responsibility for any problem, is sooner rather than later going to need a fall guy. And that, for the first time in his checkered career, is a role for which Hegseth was tailor-made.
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