If a recent Washington Post report is true, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is a war criminal.
The Post reported in late November on new details from a boat strike in the Caribbean Sea on September 2, 2025, in which the U.S. military fired a missile at a boat with 11 people on board. When two people were seen adrift and clinging to the wreckage, Hegseth reportedly ordered SEAL Team Six to “kill everybody,” according to one of the Post’s unnamed sources with direct knowledge of the operation. The Post reported that the two survivors were then “blown apart in the water.”
Under international law, this would appear to be a “no-quarter” order, and an order to kill people hors de combat (“out of the fight”), both of which are explicitly banned under the Geneva Conventions. And both of these are exactly what the six Democratic members of Congress who are military and intelligence veterans warned about in a viral video message.
On November 18, 2025, Sens. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) and Elissa Slotkin (D-Michigan) appeared in the video alongside Reps. Jason Crow (D-Colorado), Chris DeLuzio (D-Pennsylvania), Maggie Goodlander (D-New Hampshire) and Chrissy Houlahan to remind rank-and-file US military servicemen and women of their duty to disobey illegal orders. Kelly, DeLuzio, and Goodlander are Navy veterans (Goodlander was a Naval intelligence officer); Slotkin is a former CIA agent; Crow is a former US Army Ranger, and Houlahan is a retired Air Force officer.
Those six Democrats were merely stating what is already in the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). Article 92 of the UCMJ stipulates that members of the military are duty-bound to obey a “lawful general order” lest they be subjected to a court-martial proceeding. But according to the Joint Service Committee on Military Justice manual for courts-martial, service members are also expected to disobey any “patently illegal order, such as one that directs the commission of a crime.”
President Donald Trump has nonetheless labeled those Democrats as the “Seditious Six,” and Hegseth has even suggested having Sen. Kelly returned to active-duty service in order to subject him to a court-martial. Longtime Republican strategist Karl Rove scoffed at the video in a November op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, and observed that “none of the Six could name a single illegal order issued by Mr. Trump.” But the September 2 strike shows that those six Democrats were in fact offering a very relevant argument applying to current rank-and-file members of the military: If the Secretary of Defense is giving you an order that contradicts the Geneva Conventions, you are required to disobey it.
Hegseth’s order was a war crime by definition
In his initial response to the Washington Post report, Hegseth notably did not deny giving a “no-quarter” order or an order to kill people hors de combat. Hegseth defended the strike in a post to his official X account that the attack was merely one in a series of “lethal, kinetic strikes” that were “lawful under both U.S. and international law.” He also added: “Biden coddled terrorists. We kill them.” To date, however, neither Hegseth nor Trump have publicly named any of those killed in the strikes, nor charged anyone with crimes.
“We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists,” Hegseth wrote in a subsequent post.
The Trump administration maintains that the strikes are against alleged “narco-terrorists” and that the bombings are necessary to stop the flow of drugs into the United States. But this explanation makes little sense considering that Trump recently pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández—the former president of Honduras who was sentenced last year to 45 years in federal prison for conspiring to traffic 400 tons of cocaine into the US.
Regardless of the motive for the boat strikes in the Caribbean, the Sept. 2 strike has sparked bipartisan outrage among members of Congress who have oversight over the Pentagon. Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) and ranking member Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island) issued a joint statement announcing that the committee had launched an official inquiry into the strike with the Department of Defense.
Reps. Don Bacon (R-Nebraska) and Mike Turner (R-Ohio) have also condemned the attack. Bacon—who is a retired brigadier general in the Air Force—told ABC’s This Week that Hegseth quite possibly committed “a violation of the law of war.” Turner, who is the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told CBS’ Nancy Cordes that the allegations were “very serious” and that “if that occurred … I agree that would be an illegal act.”
Hegseth’s ordering of the attack was also denounced by former Judge Advocates General Corps (JAG) officers. Less than a month after Hegseth was confirmed as secretary of defense, he fired top JAG officers in the US Army, Navy, and Air Force. Those three-star officers—Lt. Gen. Joseph B. Berger III, Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Plummer and Rear Adm. Lia M. Reynolds—are tasked with giving independent legal advice to senior military leaders and making sure their orders don’t contradict U.S. or international laws.
In a statement posted to X, the Former JAGs Working Group said Hegseth’s September 2 order was tantamount to “war crimes, murder, or both.”
“If the U.S. military operation is not an armed conflict of any kind, these orders to kill helpless civilians clinging to the wreckage of a vessel our military destroyed would subject everyone from SECDEF down to the individual who pulled the trigger to prosecution under U.S. law for murder,” the statement read.
“Regardless of whether the U.S. is involved in an armed conflict, law enforcement operations, or any other application of military force, international and domestic U.S. law prohibit the intentional targeting of defenseless persons,” the statement continued. “If the Washington Post and CNN reports are true, the two survivors of the 2 September 2025 US attack against a vessel carrying 11 persons were rendered unable to continue their mission when U.S. military forces significantly damaged the vessel carrying them. Under such circumstances, not only does international law prohibit targeting these survivors, but it also requires the attacking force to protect, rescue, and, if applicable, treat them as prisoners of war.”
This same concept is further explained in a 2023 article by the Lieber Institute for Law & Land Warfare at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point. While the article was referencing an incident in Ukraine in which pro-Russian paramilitary forces carried out a “no-quarter” order on Ukrainian fighters who were hors de combat, the Lieber Institute cited International Humanitarian Law’s (IHL) Rule 46, which reads: “Ordering that no quarter will be given, threatening an adversary therewith or conducting hostilities on this basis is prohibited.”
The Lieber Institute also stated the IHL “accurately” defined the prohibition on attacking people recognized as hors de combat, pointing out that Rule 47 deems it illegal to fire on anyone who is “defenseless, for example due to wounds or being shipwrecked, or because they have expressed an intention to surrender.” When Hegseth ordered SEAL Team Six to kill all survivors of the boat strike, he was explicitly violating rules 46 and 47 of the IHL.
Trump and Hegseth have endorsed the commission of war crimes
Hegseth’s September 2 order is part and parcel of his philosophy pertaining to war. In his 2024 book “The War on Warriors,” the part-time Fox News weekend host-turned-defense secretary espoused rejecting the Geneva Conventions entirely:
“Should we follow the Geneva Conventions? What if we treated the enemy the way they treated us? Would that not be an incentive for the other side to reconsider their barbarism? Hey, Al Qaeda: If you surrender, we might spare your life. If you do not, we will rip your arms off and feed them to hogs,” Hegseth wrote. “Makes me wonder, in 2024—if you want to win—how can anyone write universal rules about killing other people in open conflict? Especially against enemies who fight like savages, disregarding human life in every single instance. Maybe, instead, we are just fighting with one hand behind our back—and the enemy knows it.”
One chapter of his book entitled “The Laws of War, For Winners” included this excerpt that journalist Anna Bower posted to Bluesky (emphasis Hegseth’s):
Article 51 of the United Nations made war legal only if you were attacked. The escalation of that war was left TBD-to be determined. Illegal wars continued, and violence still escalated. If our warriors are forced to follow rules arbitrarily and asked to sacrifice more lives so that international tribunals feel better about themselves, aren’t we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules?! Who cares what other countries think. The question we have to ask ourselves is, if we are forced to fight, are we going to fight to win? Or will we fight to make leftists feel good-which means not wining[sic] and fighting forever. In this context, the Europeans are the worst. Outdated, outgunned, invaded, and impotent. Why should America, the European “emergency contact number” for the past century, listen to self-righteous and impotent nations asking us to honor outdated and one-sided defense arrangements they no longer live up to? Maybe if NATO countries actually ponied up for their own defense-but they don’t. They just yell about the rules while gutting their militaries and yelling at America for help.”
Trump himself has also advocated for committing war crimes as a way to deter acts of terrorism as early as 2015. During his first campaign for the presidency, Trump told Fox News—in response to a question about limiting civilian casualties in the fight against ISIS—that America should lean into civilian casualties.
“You have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families,” Trump said at the time. “When they say they don’t care about their lives, you have to take out their families.”
Boaz Ganor, an Israeli counterterrorism expert who advised Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told CNN that if Trump killed ISIS terrorists’ family members, it would be a flagrant violation of international law.
“Any deliberate attacks aimed against civilians is a war crime, regardless if they are family members of terrorists or presidents or presidential candidates,” Ganor said. “Adopting this policy is immoral and against the common liberal democratic values.”
Trump has also used his pardon powers to exonerate those who have carried out atrocities on the battlefield. In 2019, Trump issued a pardon of Navy SEAL platoon leader Eddie Gallagher, who was demoted in rank and served four months of prison time for posing in a photo with the corpse of an unarmed teenage Iraqi captive he killed with a hunting knife (Gallagher was found not guilty in charges of first-degree murder, attempted murder of Iraqi civilians, and obstruction of justice). Gallagher’s fellow SEALs described him as “evil” and that he was “OK with killing anybody that was moving.”
One uncomfortable reality is that given Trump’s lack of shame about using his pardon powers—especially for figures like Hernández, attorneys who conspired to help him overturn the 2020 election, convicted fraudsters like private equity executive David Gentile, and cryptocurrency billionaire Changpeng Zhao, among others—he will likely issue a preemptive pardon to Hegseth and any other Pentagon officials who took part in the September 2 attack. However, this is all the more reason to have a larger conversation about reining in the president’s Article II pardon powers.
Regardless of what happens to Hegseth and those who report to him, the September 2 attack is all the more reason that the warning the six Democratic members of Congress made to not heed illegal orders was sound. Rank-and-file servicemen and women swore an oath not to a commander-in-chief or a defense secretary, but to the US Constitution. They are bound not to man, but to the law.
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