A Few Bad Men

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If that’s true, there’s little doubt that that second attack was illegal. The U.S. military is subject to all sorts of laws and regulations barring the intentional killing of enemies who have been disabled; the Pentagon’s own manual on the laws of war specifically cites firing on shipwrecked sailors as an example of a “clearly illegal” practice. At best, if we concede for argument’s sake that the survivors were combatants in an armed conflict, the second strike is a war crime. If they weren’t combatants, it’s out-and-out murder.

No one involved in this process seems to know how to handle it. Except, interestingly, Pete Hegseth.

In hindsight, the six Democrats who appeared in a video last week warning service members not to obey unlawful orders must have known about this incident. The timing is too coincidental to have been pure chance.

How they knew is unclear. Possibly they were tipped off when the Post’s reporters began asking questions about it on Capitol Hill, but evidently information was trickling in through official channels as well. The paper claims that lawmakers received “two closed-door briefings” about the episode at some point in which the second strike was rationalized as having eliminated wreckage that would have, ahem, created a “navigation hazard.”

The six Democrats may have found themselves in a bind. If they revealed what they knew about the incident, they would have been accused of leaking classified information and possibly pursued by Trump’s Justice Department. If they said nothing, more so-called “double tap” strikes might have been ordered and carried out. They didn’t know what to do, perhaps, so they compromised, posting a vague admonition that illegal orders are indeed illegal and hoping that those in the ranks who needed to hear that would hear it and take it to heart.

Adm. Bradley may not have known what to do either.

Surely he knew that a “no quarter” order is unlawful. According to the Post, even junior officers involved in the Caribbean strikes are sufficiently aware of how shady it is to have begun asking military lawyers for written authorization to protect themselves legally before participating. “Some have drawn distinctions between the traffickers and terrorist groups such as the Islamic State and have struggled to accept that alleged criminals meet the same threshold for lethal strikes,” the paper reported. An unspecified number are worried that they might need attorneys eventually.

If they’re capable of smelling a rat, an admiral is too. But Bradley may have run up against the sort of postliberal conundrum that I described last week. If he followed the law by leaving survivors after Hegseth ordered him to kill everyone, he probably would have been relieved of command (as many other top officers have been this year) and possibly court-martialed for insubordination. Whereas if he carried out the order, he would do so with no fear of being punished by Trump’s administration and a near-certainty of being pardoned by the president to immunize him from future criminal liability.

My guess is that Bradley found solace in the immense legal cloud that covers the entire unauthorized Caribbean mission. “There’s just so much nervousness in the office,” one former counternarcotics official told the Post of the operations. “The mood is, we don’t even know if what we’re doing is legal.” If no one knows what the law is anymore, how can any military officer reasonably be held responsible for breaking it?

The president and his party in Congress also seem caught flat-footed by the September 2 incident, to the point where each has reacted in uncharacteristic ways.

I would have expected a war-crimes aficionado like Donald Trump to boast that he personally ordered his own version of a Code Red on the shipwrecked survivors, just as I also would have expected Republicans in the House and Senate to cower in silence in the aftermath. Instead, the president told reporters on Sunday that he wouldn’t have supported a second strike aimed at killing everyone aboard and claimed that Hegseth told him he hadn’t ordered one. Meanwhile, the Republican chairmen of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees are vowing vigorous oversight to get to the bottom of what happened. Huh.

There may not be another case in the Trump era of congressional Republicans leaping to investigate the president’s administration, especially for the sin of being too ruthless toward an enemy. Perhaps the military is a red line for them: Postliberalism can run roughshod over the rest of the government for all they care, but unmooring the armed forces from law in order to sate a former Fox News host’s bloodlust is too much. Besides, Trump in his “fat Elvis” stage isn’t as politically formidable as he used to be. House and Senate conservatives have a little political capital to spend for once, and they’re poised to spend it on a good cause.

As for Elvis himself, despite the Supreme Court’s best efforts to incentivize him to commit crimes, Trump may yet feel some niggling doubt about whether he might be prosecuted one day for certain offenses he commits as president. He’s immune from criminal jeopardy when exercising his core powers, which of course includes his power as commander in chief of the military. But if he exercises that power in a way that’s obviously inconsistent with law—like, say, by authorizing a blatant war crime—how confident can he be that some future court will affirm that brazenly killing people without justification lies within the president’s “core” capacity?

Even if he believes his immunity will hold up, he can’t afford a new political liability when his job approval is crashing, Republican incumbents are retiring, and the midterms are starting to look like they’ll be a blue wave. The degree of unaccountability he’ll enjoy in his last two years as president depends on whether his party holds onto both houses of Congress next fall. A war-crimes scandal won’t make that easier, especially considering that the inevitable ends-justifies-the-means logic that will be used to defend Trump in this matter has an obvious flaw. Namely, if we want the president to do everything in his power to discourage drug trafficking, why is he also … handing out pardons to convicted drug traffickers?

Which brings us to Pete Hegseth, the one figure in this drama who seems comfortable with how it’s playing out.

The degree of overkill involved in the September 2 operation makes me think he was intimately involved in the planning. For one thing, it was carried out by Navy SEAL Team 6, arguably the most elite unit in the entire military. I can’t imagine why a force like that would be needed for a turkey shoot in the Caribbean involving accused drug smugglers unless Hegseth was so eager to impress the boss with how gung ho he was to kill “narco-terrorists” that he went and got the guys who killed Osama bin Laden to carry it out.

Hegseth’s response to the Post story exposing the “double tap” strike was also deft by the political standards in 2025, though. Not only did he not apologize or deny the allegations apart from an obligatory mention of “fake news,” he mocked the public outcry over the report by posting an AI image of Franklin the turtle firing a bazooka at boats. That’s precisely the right move for an official serving in Trump’s government: Even if the president is squeamish about the politics of defending war crimes, Hegseth knows that the feral right-wing postliberal base will always rally behind unabashed ruthlessness, lawful or not.

He’s playing Col. Jessup here, essentially. For Trump to fire him under these circumstances would be seen by MAGA as an unforgivable capitulation to bleeding-heart liberals. 

Hegseth’s sorry-not-sorry shtick is especially glaring given that he has a defense available to him. When he ordered Adm. Bradley to kill everybody, the secretary might say, he meant only that the boat should be destroyed, not that any survivors should be finished off. Bradley misunderstood him. The admiral might be guilty of a war crime, but Hegseth himself is not.

He’s not going to argue that, though, because I suspect he believes—correctly—that he’ll gain political stature by claiming responsibility. He has a brighter future in the GOP as a man who, in word and in deed, has proven his disdain for the Geneva Conventions than as a man who obeys the rules of war even when that means declining an opportunity to kill the wounded.

There are no reports of further “double tap” strikes since September 2. When an attack in the Caribbean on October 16 also left survivors, for example, the military acted appropriately and rescued them.

Coincidentally, U.S. Southern Command chief Adm. Alvin Holsey announced that same day that he would leave his position early. Did Hegseth demand another “double tap” strike, only to meet resistance from Holsey this time? Inquiring minds on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees should want to know.

Regardless, no one should trust the Trump administration to learn from its mistakes. Can anything be done to deter the chain of command from executing disabled enemies in the future?

Democrats in Congress could threaten to charge anyone involved once they’re back in power, and in fact one already has. “Mark my words: It may take some time, but Americans will be prosecuted for this, either as a war crime or outright murder,” Rep. Seth Moulton warned the Post, which is nice but obviously empty rhetoric. A president who was willing to pardon the foot soldiers of the January 6 coup plot will obviously pardon actual soldiers, as well as Pete Hegseth, for carrying out his Duterte-esque bloodletting of suspected drug dealers.

No one will be prosecuted. Nor will anyone be turned over to The Hague for prosecution by an international war crimes tribunal. Americans would blanch at the idea of U.S. officials being forced to answer to Euroweenies for their actions, and a Democratic administration wouldn’t want to start another new unprecedented partisan tit-for-tat. Don’t tempt President J.D. Vance to send Old Man Biden to stand trial in Moscow for aiding the Ukrainian “rebellion.”

Democrats could threaten to demote any service members who comply with unlawful orders like “double tap” strikes, but I doubt that would have much deterrent power either. Trump has already set a precedent of replacing top military officials whose tenures haven’t yet expired with officers more to his liking; the next Democratic president will doubtless do the same lest he be stuck with handpicked Trump appointees like Dan Caine as Joint Chiefs chairman or even Patel as FBI director. That is, I expect we’re entering an era in which the top brass simply retires to avert being fired once a president whom they’ve served loyally is replaced by one from the party. Adm. Bradley probably won’t be there to demote in 2029.

And as for demoting junior officers who aren’t of retirement age, Americans won’t like that either. The “just following orders” defense is a sympathetic one for young adults whose jobs depend on following orders.

Which leaves impeachment. What if Democrats threatened to impeach Trump over this—or Hegseth?

He wouldn’t be the first defense secretary impeached by the House, you know. And although acquittal by the Senate is assured, forcing Republicans to explain why Hegseth shouldn’t be removed for his role in an obvious war crime would be good politics for Democrats. There’s an obvious flaw in the strategy, though: Hegseth would love it. Nothing would make a performer like him happier than getting to spend weeks on television every day doing his Col. Jessup routine to the delight of lowbrow Republican voters. It might vault him into 2028 contention in case something happens to Vance.

Threatening to impeach Trump might work better. Granted, he’s an old hand at impeachments by now and faces no risk of being removed by the Senate. (If you believe what he told reporters this weekend, he didn’t even know of the second strike on September 2.) But the same advantages in impeaching Hegseth would apply here. The process would force Republicans to defend atrocities, impress upon the military that war crimes won’t be tolerated even when the president orders them, and focus public attention on the already unpopular practice of blowing up boats without knowing who’s on board.

On the other hand, if Democrats start chattering about impeachment, they’ll tickle right-wingers’ tribal erogenous zones and risk a familiar “rally around the president” effect. Trump’s support might rise. And he’d suddenly have an excuse to change the subject from the economy, the issue that’s eating him alive.

The best outcome might be one that’s only achievable through private, not public, channels. Getting the most dangerous man in the government out of the Pentagon would be a good result, but the president surely won’t fire Hegseth under public pressure from Democrats. Perhaps he’ll be more amenable if it’s conveyed to him informally that the new House majority will probe the September 2 episode aggressively next year, with multiple impeachments possible, unless he finds a pretext to get rid of Secretary Pete ASAP. There’s no shortage of better qualified candidates waiting in the wings; all the president has to do is find someone who doesn’t treat war crimes as a form of bravado.

In a kakistocracy it’s too much to ask the head of state to surround himself with a few good men. But he can certainly surround himself with some slightly less bad ones.