Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has made contempt for what he calls “stupid rules of engagement” — limits meant to reduce risks to civilians — central to his political identity, and has boasted that he unleashed the military to use “maximum authorities on the battlefield” in the Iran war.
“Our warfighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the president and yours truly,” Mr. Hegseth said at a briefing four days after the war started. “Our rules of engagement are bold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it.”
This and similar statements are now the backdrop to a body of evidence that the destruction of an Iranian elementary school during the opening hours of the war was likely caused by an American missile strike. The preliminary finding of an ongoing military investigation has determined that the United States was responsible, The New York Times has reported.
The destruction of the school, which coincided with an attack on an adjacent Iranian naval base, killed about 175 civilians, most of them children, according to Iranian officials.
Long before this war, Mr. Hegseth’s opposition to stricter versions of limits on what U.S. forces need to see and know about a potential target before they may open fire drew criticism. Retired commanders argue that the point of such constraints is not just law, morality and honor, but strategic self-interest. Mistakes that kill civilians stoke anti-Americanism — alienating allies, creating new enemies and making wars harder to win.
“You don’t want to turn the entire population against the United States,” said Mark Hertling, a retired three-star Army general. “If you are bombing indiscriminately — like may have happened on several occasions, to include the girls’ school — that would negate any opportunity to have a positive regime change.”
Pressed about the incident as the details have gradually come to light, Mr. Hegseth has repeatedly responded by saying the matter is under investigation and stressing that the United States does not target civilians.
“We’re certainly investigating,” Mr. Hegseth said on Saturday, for example, standing behind President Trump on Air Force One. “But the only — the only side that targets civilians is Iran.”
But the issue is not targeting civilians — such as a situation in which an armed force deliberately attacks a civilian building knowing full well what it is, because it wants and intends to kill civilians.
If the United States attacked the building under the mistaken belief that it was a military facility, the issue is instead how strict or lax the rules of engagement in Mr. Hegseth’s Pentagon were for identifying and verifying the nature of a potential target.
What standards of certainty were imposed on planners for the strikes for vetting and validating potential targets? Does Mr. Hegseth’s repeated statement that he gave the military “maximum authority on the battlefield,” compared with the practice in past wars, mean the standards were formally lowered? Whatever the rules were on paper, did such comments contribute to a culture of moving faster and with less care — of “no hesitation,” in his words — among the planners, resulting in negligence or recklessness?
The school was next door to an Iranian military base full of buildings that were destroyed by precision missile strikes. The school building was once part of that base, before it was fenced off between 2013 and 2016 and converted to civilian use. Officials familiar with the preliminary findings of the official investigation said the strike relied on outdated intelligence and questions remained about why it had not been double checked.
The Pentagon press office declined to comment, saying only that “the incident is under investigation.” It also declined to say who is conducting the investigation.
Usually, the Navy would perform an after-action review of strikes involving Tomahawks fired from a naval vessel, which would ultimately go to Mr. Hegseth for review and approval.
In theory, the Pentagon’s inspector general could conduct a more independent inquiry. But Mr. Trump last year fired the experienced watchdog there, and recently installed as a replacement a former political appointee from his first administration with no prior experience doing inspector general work, Platte B. Moring III.
Last month, Mr. Moring froze a staff proposal to evaluate targeting practices and procedures in the military attacks on boats the administration says are suspected of smuggling drugs, saying he wanted to consult department leadership. He also told staff that it sounded like such a project could be highly political, according to a person briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
His office noted it has not publicly announced any projects related to the Iran war operation and declined to comment on the status of the boat strike matter.
Challenging guardrails
“War is hell,” as Mr. Hegseth frequently points out. But traditionally, American military leadership has expressed concern about the risk of civilian casualties. Especially during the counterinsurgency efforts of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, when U.S. and allied commanders realized that winning local cooperation was key, they imposed rules of engagement that the military considered to be more restrictive than the minimum guardrails required by the laws of war.
The Pentagon’s own law-of-war manual states that the military, in planning and conducting attacks, must “in good faith based on the information available at the time, take feasible precautions to verify that the person or object is a military objective.” It also notes that “policymakers may choose to apply heightened standards of identification, greater than those required by the law of war, to reduce the risk of incidental harm in conducting an attack.”
Mr. Hegseth thinks differently. He has tried to reshape Pentagon culture, reveling in lethality with “no apologies, no hesitation.” He has portrayed this approach as a “warrior ethos,” one that is tough and manly.
He came up as an Army infantry officer and, as he wrote in his 2024 memoir “The War on Warriors,” loathed strict rules of engagement imposed to minimize risk to civilians, seeing heightened standards for when his platoon could open fire as putting soldiers at greater risk on the battlefield. He blamed judge advocate general lawyers, or JAGs, for such rules — even though it is commanders, not lawyers, who issue them.
Mr. Hegseth later continued that line of thinking as a Fox News contributor and host and as an advocate for U.S. service members charged with war crimes. In his 2024 book, he questioned the need to obey the Geneva Conventions and derisively referred to military lawyers as “jagoffs.”
After Mr. Trump appointed him to lead the Defense Department, Mr. Hegseth fired the top JAGs for the military services and shuttered Pentagon offices that focused on preventing and responding to civilian harm during U.S. combat operations.
For the first few days of the war in Iran, when details about the school strike were murky, Mr. Hegseth boasted at briefings about how he had dialed the rules of engagement down to a minimum.
Unlike traditional American allies “who wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force,” he said on March 2, the United States was using force on its own terms “with maximum authorities — no stupid rules of engagement.”
It was two days later that he described his rules of engagement as unleashing, not shackling, American power, saying the pilots and operators conducting airstrikes were “controlling the skies, picking targets — death and destruction from the sky all day long.”
On March 5, he said that “the dumb, politically correct wars of the past were the opposite of what we’re doing here” because they were fought “with restrictive, minimalist rules of engagement,” but in this one, engagement authorities were “maxed out.”
But as more facts have emerged about the school, Mr. Hegseth has softened his tone. At a press briefing on Tuesday, while he still described the mission as “maximum authority,” he did not specifically mention more permissive rules of engagement. Instead, he emphasized and praised precautions to protect civilians.
“Seeing it from the inside every single day, including this, no nation takes more precautions to ensure there’s never targeting of civilians than the United States of America,” he said, adding: “No nation in the history of warfare has ever attempted in every way possible to avoid civilian casualties. And frankly, that’s a point that just isn’t appreciated enough.”
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.
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