Amid allegations of his involvement in possible war crimes, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth now cites the “fog of war” as a factor in the reported killing of survivors of a U.S. missile strike on an alleged drug-trafficking boat off the coast of Latin America in September, and claims he “watched that first strike live” but “didn’t stick around” for subsequent strikes.
Rewind: “I watched it live,” Hegseth told Fox on Sept. 3. “We knew exactly who was in that boat. We knew exactly what they were doing, and we knew exactly who they represented, and that was Tren de Aragua, a narco-terrorist organization designated by the United States, trying to poison our country with illicit drugs,” he told his former employer. (For what it’s worth, to this day, no U.S. officials have provided evidence supporting these claims.)
Update: Hegseth said Tuesday that he only saw the first strike. “I watched that first strike live,” he said in the cabinet meeting. “I didn’t stick around for the hour and two hours or whatever where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs. So I moved on to my next meeting. A couple of hours later, I learned that that commander had made the—which he had the complete authority to do. And by the way, Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat. He sunk the boat, sunk the boat and eliminated the threat and it was the right call. We have his back.”
About that “hour and two hours or whatever”: The Washington Post reported Friday it only took “minutes” before the survivors were seen in surveillance footage. As the Post’s Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima reported, “A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.”
New detail: “The U.S. military struck that boat on September 2 four times,” a U.S. official told Nick Schifrin of PBS News. “The official said that, after the first strike, there were people on board who were not killed. The second strike targeted them. The third and fourth strikes were designed to sink the boat.”
Hegseth was later asked Tuesday at the White House, “So you didn’t see any survivors, to be clear, after that first strike, you personally?” The defense secretary replied, “I did not personally see survivors, but I stand—because the thing was on fire. That was exploded [sic], and fire or smoke—you can’t see anything. You got digital.”
“This is called the fog of war,” Hegseth said. “This is what you and the press don’t understand. You sit in your air-conditioned offices or up on Capitol Hill and you nitpick and you plant fake stories in the Washington Post about ‘kill everybody’ phrases on anonymous sources, not based in anything, not based in any truth at all.”
Scheduled for tomorrow: Adm. Bradley is scheduled to deliver a classified briefing to Congress on Thursday, the Associated Press reported Monday.
Worth noting: Archival tape from April 2016 reveals Hegseth telling an audience that the U.S. military should not follow “unlawful orders from their commander-in-chief.” CNN reported Tuesday on the re-surfaced video of his remarks, which you can view here.
Why bring it up: Because Hegseth is attempting to prosecute a senator for saying the same thing last month. In mid-November, six Democratic lawmakers released a video reminding U.S. troops not to follow illegal orders. One of those lawmakers was the former astronaut and retired Navy Capt. Mark Kelly, a senator from Arizona. Both the president and Hegseth responded angrily to the video, with Trump alleging online that the lawmakers’ video amounted to “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” Hegseth’s Defense Department on Nov. 24 then vowed on social media to recall Kelly back to active duty “for court-martial proceedings or administrative measures.”
Kelly responded Monday: “I will not be intimidated by this president. I am not going to be silenced by this president or the people around because I’ve given too much in service to this country to back down to this guy,” he said at a press conference in Washington.
Extra reading:
Welcome to this Wednesday 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 2015, Defense Secretary Ash Carter opened all military jobs to women.
Around the Defense Department
Air Force leaders axe China-focused reorganizational efforts. Early last year, then-Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall unveiled a slate of initiatives intended to get the service in better shape to fight “the pacing threat.” Suspending work on those was one of the first things Pete Hegseth did after taking office. Now Troy Meink, who stepped into Kendall’s job in May, is formally cancelling much of the effort.
In a Tuesday press release, Meink and Chief of Staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach said that the service will no longer:
- Stand up Air Development Command, which aimed to subsume Air Education and Training Command and further combine the service’s force-development efforts.
- Reorient Air Combat Command to “focus on generating and presenting ready forces.”
- Establish its Air Base Wing concept.
- Create a new Program Assessment and Evaluation Office to handle resource analysis. And more. Read Thomas Novelly’s article, here.
New: Hundreds of companies were just picked for an up-to-$151 billion “Golden Dome” contract vehicle. In a sign of how quickly the Pentagon wants to move on Trump’s ambitious missile-defense effort, more than 1,000 companies were cleared to compete for slices of the gargantuan Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense (SHIELD) contract vehicle, the acquisition backbone of the Golden Dome effort, Defense One’s Novelly reports.
DOD announced the decision in a late-Tuesday blue-topper, and published the names of the qualifying companies on SAM.gov. Novelly has more, here.
Coming soon: The Pentagon inspector general’s investigation into SecDef Hegseth’s “Signalgate” controversy is complete. A copy of the final report was given to Hegseth Tuesday, NBC News reports.
In case you need a refresher, Hegseth used the Signal messaging app to share details of a U.S. military attack in Yemen before it happened. The public discovered this because a journalist for The Atlantic was inadvertently added to the encrypted group chat. After the mission was complete and it was discovered that no U.S. troops were harmed, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic wrote about the possibly unprecedented incident.
“The much-anticipated report is expected to become public as early as this week,” two people familiar with the investigation told NBC on Tuesday. Read more, here.
NSA has 2,000 fewer people now, meeting Trump-admin goal. That’s what three people told Nextgov’s David DiMolfetta, asking for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak. An agency spokesman declined comment.
“The purge reflects months-long pressure by the second Trump administration to shrink the federal government and clean out alleged bloat and politicization in the intelligence community. Employees at the nation’s various spy agencies were initially extended deferred-resignation offers in February, and in May, news broke of the downsizing goals for the intel community and NSA specifically.”
BTW: The federal government doesn’t say how many people work for NSA, but a fact sheet put out by the state of Maryland last year said it was around 39,000. Read on, here.
Additional reading: “CISA tells staff to not speak with reporters, internal email shows,” Nextgov reported Tuesday.
New: The U.S. military just launched its first-ever “one-way-attack drone squadron based in the Middle East,” according to officials at Central Command.
It’s known as Task Force Scorpion Strike, and pictures of CENTCOM’s drones seem to strongly resemble the cheap yet effective Shahed drones manufactured by Iran for use in the Middle East and in Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. CENTCOM refers to theirs as “Low-cost Unmanned Combat Attack System [or LUCAS] drones.”
According to CENTCOM, the LUCAS drones “have an extensive range and are designed to operate autonomously. They can be launched with different mechanisms to include catapults, rocket-assisted takeoff, and mobile ground and vehicle systems.”
How will they be used? It’s not yet clear, though U.S. troops are still engaged in a war against ISIS militants in Iraq and Syria. Read more from CENTCOM, here.
Related commentary: “The U.S. proposal to establish a military presence at an airbase near Damascus is a welcome sign of deepening cooperation with Syria’s new government, but it may be insufficient to secure regional U.S. interests,” argues policy analyst Jonah Brody and retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas Bergeson, both of whom now work at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America.
“A Damascus presence should complement—not replace—the U.S. partnership with the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, which remains essential to preventing a resurgence of the Islamic State, or ISIS, and constraining Iranian activity,” the two men advise, writing Tuesday in Defense One.
Recommendation: “The United States should continue to build on the ‘by, with, and through’ partnership that has made the SDF the most effective counter-ISIS force in Syria,” Bergeson and Brody say. “Sustaining this relationship—through training, intelligence sharing, and support to detention operations—is the best way to prevent ISIS from reconstituting. It also signals to regional partners that the United States remains committed to a stable transition in Syria rather than stepping back prematurely.” Read the rest, here.
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