Secretary of War Pete Hegseth courageously served his country in uniform, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unfortunately, even as he knows military culture from personal experience, Hegseth doesn’t appear to realize that emotional rants and barracks banter are ill-suited to his current role.
Take Hegseth’s response to the controversy surrounding his Sept. 1 order to destroy a Tren de Aragua drug cartel boat operating just off the Venezuelan coast. The Washington Post reports that Hegseth ordered the U.S. military to kill everybody on the boat. When a first strike left two of the 11 crew members alive, an admiral then ordered a second strike to eliminate the survivors. Critics say that Hegseth ordered a war crime.
This is inaccurate.
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Still, Hegseth’s responses to the criticism are unbecoming. First, Hegseth complained that the story represented “fake news,” offering “more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland.” He then posted the following image on his X social media account.
That image is likely to have earned hearty laughs from young enlisted Marines, sailors, soldiers, and airmen. But it will also have earned wincing looks from non-commissioned officers and officers. Those more experienced military professionals know that their business is deadly serious. They also recognize that while war is well-suited to dark humor amid crisis, it is very ill-suited to senior leadership that treats the art of war with a casual unseriousness.
Hegseth’s play on the Franklin the Turtle would be funny were he a junior officer in command of the drone unit responsible for the attack, and posted the picture to the unit’s ready room. But Hegseth is no longer a junior officer; he is the second-highest-ranking civilian leader of the U.S. armed forces. When he makes silly X posts or unnecessarily swears on camera while addressing top generals, or complains about “inflammatory” media reporting, or restricts basic media freedom altogether, he only makes himself and his department look insecure and unserious.
To be clear, criticism of the war secretary is unfair in this specific case. When it comes to this boat strike, the available evidence suggests that he issued only one order to strike. And even if he had said “kill everybody,” that directive should have been construed as an admittedly blustering way of stating his intent that the boat be targeted. Because the boat was struck just off the Venezuelan coast, the U.S. admiral who ordered the follow-up strike had a weak but legitimate argument that the survivors and cargo of the first strike could be rescued and thus deserved secondary targeting.
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We should also remember that Tren de Aragua is an important cog in the vast drug smuggling business. A trade that is directly responsible for destabilizing societies, fueling extreme violence, and ruining countless lives. Considering the absolute inadequacy of law enforcement efforts to counter this threat, President Donald Trump has the constitutional authority and national interest to justify using lethal force against the cartels. Moreover, anyone who knows anything about CIA and Drug Enforcement Administration operations against the cartels knows that those cartels have repeatedly engaged in lethal hostilities against the United States in the shadows.
Still, Hegseth’s job is too important and its stakes too consequential to find complement with casual flippancy.