“Kill everybody.” Several key bipartisan U.S. lawmakers are warning the U.S. military may have committed war crimes when it launched its first attacks against alleged drug-trafficking boats around Latin America on Sept. 2, according to reporting Friday from Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post.
Rewind: After the very first U.S. strike, at least two survivors were seen still alive and “clinging to the smoldering wreck” of their destroyed boat, according to the Post’s reporting, which cited seven people with knowledge of the event. Eleven people had been on the boat when the military first hit it with a missile. When a drone feed revealed the two survivors moments later, the Joint Special Operations commander overseeing the strikes at the time—Navy Adm. Frank Bradley—ordered a second strike to kill them, and the “two men were blown apart in the water,” according to the Post.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had delivered a spoken directive to “kill everybody” on the boat, a person with direct knowledge of the operation told the Post. It’s not clear that Hegseth was aware of the survivors; but his subordinates were reportedly keen on following orders since, as the Post reports, Bradley “ordered the second strike to fulfill Hegseth’s directive that everyone must be killed.” (Bradley has since been placed in command of U.S. Special Operations Command, which oversees JSOC.) “If the video of the blast that killed the two survivors on Sept. 2 were made public, people would be horrified, said one person who watched the live feed,” the newspaper reports.
If the reporting is true, it would appear the U.S. military violated Section 5.4.7 of the Defense Department’s Law of War Manual (PDF), which states “it is prohibited to order that legitimate offers of surrender will be refused or that detainees, such as unprivileged belligerents, will be summarily executed.” The manual continues, “Moreover, it is also prohibited to conduct hostilities on the basis that there shall be no survivors, or to threaten the adversary with the denial of quarter. This rule is based on both humanitarian and military considerations. This rule also applies during non-international armed conflict.”
Notable: Hegseth did not dispute the account; but he did call the Post’s reporting “fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory,” writing Friday on social media, and insisted “Our current operations in the Caribbean are lawful under both U.S. and international law.”
New: Both the House and Senate Armed Services Committee leaders announced investigations into the allegations. From the Senate side, “The Committee has directed inquiries to the Department, and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances,” Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and Jack Reed, D-R.I., said in a joint statement, The Hill reported Saturday morning.
HASC leaders also vowed “bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question,” according to a joint statement from Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and Adam Smith, D-Wash., Saturday afternoon. “This committee is committed to providing rigorous oversight of the Department of Defense’s military operations in the Caribbean. We take seriously the reports of follow-on strikes on boats alleged to be ferrying narcotics in the SOUTHCOM region,” they said. (And for what it’s worth, “The two committees referred to the Department of Defense by that name, rather than by the ‘Department of War’ rebrand Hegseth and Trump have pushed,” historian Heather Cox Richardson noted Saturday evening.)
“This rises to the level of a war crime if it’s true,” said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., speaking Sunday on “Face the Nation” from CBS News.
“Obviously, if that occurred, that would be very serious and I agree that that would be an illegal act,” said Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, speaking Sunday on “Face the Nation” as well. Turner also said the reported events are “completely outside anything that has been discussed with Congress and there is an ongoing investigation.”
“We should get to the truth,” said former Air Force Brig. Gen. Don Bacon, R-Neb., speaking Sunday on “This Week” from ABC News. “I don’t think he would be foolish enough to make this decision to say, kill everybody, kill the survivors because that’s a clear violation of the law of war,” Bacon said.
Legal POV: “[T]here can be no conceivable legal justification” for what the Post’s reporting alleges, argues former Pentagon counsel Jack Goldsmith, writing Friday on Substack.
President Trump’s reaction: “He said he did not say that. And I believe him 100%,” the president told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday. He then added, “I wouldn’t have wanted that, not a second strike.”
- By the way: The 10th chapter in Hegseth’s book is titled, “More lethality, less lawyers,” Anna Bower of Lawfare noted on social media. “It’s almost as if the signs were there all along,” she added.
Latest: Hegseth appeared to be trying to make light of the allegations, posting a meme about the alleged war crime to social media on Sunday evening using an AI-generated image based on the children’s book series, Franklin the turtle. At least two Franklin-based memes were shared by users in response, here and here, emphasizing the legal stakes of Hegseth’s war on drug boats.
Additional reading: “Trump’s Focus on Drug War Means Big Business for Defense Startups” in the business of selling drones, sensors and AI-based surveillance platforms to the military, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.
Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1969, the U.S. held its first military draft lottery since the Second World War.
Ukraine
Peace-talks update: Ukraine won’t give up land, says the country’s chief negotiator. “As long as Zelensky is president, no one should count on us giving up territory. He will not sign away territory,” Andriy Yermak told The Atlantic’s Simon Shuster by telephone from Kyiv last week. “The constitution prohibits this.”
Ukraine “is prepared to discuss only where the line should be drawn to demarcate what the warring sides control,” Shuster wrote, quoting Yermak as saying, “All we can realistically talk about right now is really to define the line of contact…And that’s what we need to do.” Read on, here.
Russia launched Trump’s peace plan with promises of profits. The Wall Street Journal reports. “For the Kremlin, the Miami talks were the culmination of a strategy, hatched before Trump’s inauguration, to bypass the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and convince the administration to view Russia not as a military threat but as a land of bountiful opportunity, according to Western security officials. By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals, Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.”
Putin’s negotiator, Kirill Dmitriev, told Trump envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner that U.S. companies might “tap the roughly $300 billion of Russian central bank assets, frozen in Europe, for U.S.-Russian investment projects and a U.S.-led reconstruction of Ukraine. U.S. and Russian companies could join to exploit the vast mineral wealth in the Arctic.” Read the quintuple(!)-bylined WSJ article, here.
Rep. Don Bacon: “We saw that Wall Street Journal article yesterday that many people around the president are hoping to make billions of dollars—these are all billionaires in their own right—from…Russia, if they get a favorable agreement with Ukraine. That alarms me tremendously,” the former Air Force one-star told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.
“Putin’s the invader, he’s the dictator, he’s murdered all his opponents. But I just don’t see that moral clarity coming from the White House,” he continued. “I don’t want to see a foreign policy based on greed. I want to see it based on doing the right thing.”
Historian reax: “The Trump administration is replacing American democracy with a kleptocracy, a system of corruption in which a network of ruling elites use the institutions of government to steal public assets for their own private gain,” warned Heather Richardson of Boston College, writing Sunday. “It permits virtually unlimited theft while the head of state provides cover for his cronies through pardons and the uneven application of the law. It is the system Russia’s president Vladimir Putin exploits in Russia, and President Donald J. Trump is working to establish it in the United States of America.”
Additional reading:
Around the Defense Department
Space Force won’t say who got money to start developing orbital interceptors. The amounts are small—under $9.5 million apiece—which exempts them from disclosure requirements, but at least some of them are likely to lead to contracts worth billions of dollars. Several experts said the secrecy that surrounds the wildly ambitious Golden Dome project has several drawbacks. Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reports, here.
The Navy detected plutonium in the air at a shuttered San Francisco shipyard a year before it told anyone. Pu-239 was detected at an “Action Level” at the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in November 2024, but only revealed in October. “On this issue we did not do a good job,” Michael Pound, the Navy’s environmental coordinator overseeing the site’s clean-up, said at a recent community meeting. The Guardian has more, here.
D.C. Guard shooting
A National Guardman is “fighting for his life” after the Wednesday shooting that left another dead in Washington, D.C. Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe is hospitalized in critical condition, West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey said Saturday on “Fox & Friends.”
Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom died on Thanksgiving, one day after the attack. Arrested: Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national, has been charged with first-degree murder. USA Today has more, here.
Commentary: “A Terrible and Avoidable Tragedy in D.C.,” is how former Homeland Security official Juliette Kayyem described the shooting, writing the day after in The Atlantic.
Additional reading:
Overseas
Germany is raising its defenses, following an 1,800-page playbook. WSJ: “The blueprint details how as many as 800,000 German, U.S. and other NATO troops would be ferried eastward toward the front line. It maps the ports, rivers, railways and roads they would travel, and how they would be supplied and protected on the way.”
The logistics plan is part of an “‘all-of-society’ approach to war,” that marks “a return to a Cold-War mindset, but updated to account for new threats and hurdles—from Germany’s decrepit infrastructure to inadequate legislation and a smaller military—that didn’t exist at the time.” Read on, here.
Additional reading: “Taiwan puts $40 billion toward building a defense dome and buying US weapons,” the Associated Press reported on Wednesday.
Read the full article here