“Maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” The secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, dropped that memorable rhyme last fall, just weeks before an address to military leadership that invoked lethality seven times. The White House celebrates “the most lethal military on Earth.” The Heritage Foundation crows about “a military focused on lethality.” One office within the Pentagon recently tweeted the following extremely online self-description: “Low cortisol. Locked in. Lethalitymaxxing.”
Lethality has been a defense-policy buzzword for nearly a decade, but lately it has swelled into a rhetorical fixation. “It’s lethality, lethality, lethality. Everything else is gone.” That’s not some concerned officer’s assessment of today’s Pentagon; it’s Hegseth himself, in 2024, declaring his priorities for a military he believed had allowed itself to “go woke.” He aimed to eliminate any distraction from, or impediment to, the core task of killing people America wants dead and destroying stuff America wants destroyed, whether those obstacles were legal, ethical, strategic or just superficial culture-war fixations. No programs to minimize civilian deaths. No “stupid rules of engagement” that tie soldiers’ hands. No “fat troops” or “beardos” or ships named after Harvey Milk or Harriet Tubman. “Maximum lethality,” he once wrote. “Anything else is [expletive].”
That’s from “The War on Warriors,” a 2024 book about how the “tough, manly and unapologetically lethal” armed forces are beleaguered by “beta-male” “candy-asses” and “micromanaging dilettantes” — people who ensure that “modern warfighters fight lawyers as much as we fight bad guys” and “will not stop until trans-lesbian black females run everything.” In a chapter whose title might bother readers of a language column on multiple levels (“More Lethality, Less Lawyers”), he describes telling his command in Iraq to ignore the rules of engagement laid out by a judge advocate general. “Our job is to kill the enemy,” he writes elsewhere — “and when we get rid of the [expletive] consuming our military right now, we are the best in the world.”
Lethality was not always quite this pungent. It took off in 2017, when James Mattis became secretary of defense. He sought to put the military on a war footing: less counterterrorism and anti-insurgency work, more preparation for world-historic conflict with powers like China. (The goal, I was told by Jeff Schogol, a journalist at the military news outlet Task & Purpose, was combat readiness for “the kind of war that the U.S. has not fought since World War II.”) Lethality was the watchword for this effort. Its precise meaning went undefined, despite wonkish debate and stabs at quantitative metrics, but it was added to the department’s mission statement and took pride of place its 2018 strategy summary.
From there, it was “like bunnies reproducing on PowerPoints,” one expert told Schogol that year. Everything had to be pitched as satisfying senior leadership’s latest priority, from Air Force meals (“the right nutrition to increase lethality”) to remote-control dog doors (“adds lethality for K9 unit”). Navy grooming rules on ponytails and dreadlocks were described as creating “an inclusive team that is focused on being more lethal to our competitors, more lethal to our rivals, our enemies, and much more inclusive.” Even the day-old bread of an inclusion policy could be stuffed full of the hot new thing — meaty, cheesy lethality.
Every era has its defense jargon. Often it’s rife with euphemism, designed to make unpalatable, controversial or legally murky events seem dry and juridical — from “friendly fire” to “enhanced interrogation” (torture) and “extraordinary rendition” (kidnapping). Some stretch across eras and uses. “Kinetic strikes” once referred to kinetic weapons, but it grew into a tech-y catchall for any direct physical engagement: Donald Rumsfeld used it as part of his professorial guru-of-war vibe, while Obama aides seemed to deploy it to make foreign interventions sound surgical and low-touch. (Libya, 2011: “Not a war,” just a “kinetic military action.”) Hegseth, too, will adopt this language, announcing something like a “lethal, kinetic strike on a narco-trafficking vessel” in the Caribbean.
Lethality is different. It’s blunt instead of vague, brash instead of evasive, bold instead of cautious. For some, the machismo can gradually wear away and leave the word sounding almost boyish. The Pentagon that peppers its communications with “lethality” is led by an official who says he wants the “biggest, most badass military on the planet.” “Video games are definitely not combat,” Hegseth once wrote — yet the department pumps out attitude-heavy meme videos in which images of missiles striking Iran mingle with clips from “John Wick” films and Call of Duty games. Lethality begins to operate in an action-blockbuster, Mountain-Dew-Code-Red sort of register.
All that certainly makes it feel like the opposite of a euphemism, at least the first hundred times you hear it. But it’s possible it obfuscates almost as much as the old jargon. Inside the Pentagon, it’s a policy aim. Outside, it seems to promise simplicity: We will “unleash American power, not shackle it.” The military will focus on its core utility of killing and destroying, unhampered by lawyerly scolding — or by the kinds of strategic conundrums that frustrated its years in Iraq and Afghanistan, where it was unclear who, if anyone, should be fought or killed, in what numbers, to achieve the desired outcomes. The job, supposedly, is narrower than that now: lethality, lethality, lethality. Everything else is gone.
Nitsuh Abebe is a story editor for the magazine.
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