US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is facing mounting scrutiny after insisting he never saw survivors from a September 2 military strike in the Caribbean Sea before a second, deadly attack that legal experts say may constitute a war crime.
Speaking at a White House Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Hegseth said he watched the first strike on an alleged drug-smuggling vessel “in real-time”, but did not witness the follow-up attack that killed two people clinging to the wreckage.
“As you can imagine, at the Department of War, we’ve got a lot of things to do, so I didn’t stick around… I moved on to my next meeting,” he said, using the Trump administration’s rebranded name for the Pentagon.
Hegseth maintained that the scene was obscured.
“I did not personally see survivors,” he said. “This is called the fog of war.”
He defended Admiral Frank Bradley, the special operations commander who ordered the second strike, calling his decision “the right call” to “eliminate the threat”.
But pressure for accountability is now expanding by the day.
Democratic lawmakers and legal scholars say the double-tap strike violates international law. US Senator Chris Van Hollen, referencing Hegseth’s former career as a Fox News host, posted:
“Secretary Talk Show Host may have been experiencing the ‘fog of war,’ but that doesn’t change the fact that this was an extrajudicial killing amounting to murder or a war crime… Pete Hegseth is unfit to serve. He must resign.”
The Washington Post reported that commanders ordered the second strike to comply with Hegseth’s directive that “no one be left alive”. The defense chief blasted the report as “fake news”, “fabricated”, and “inflammatory”.
Still, the Pentagon’s own manual explicitly calls orders to fire on shipwrecked survivors “clearly illegal”.
The deadly operation was part of the Trump administration’s sweeping anti-narcotics military campaign, which has already struck at least 22 vessels across the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. At least 83 people have been killed, many with no publicly disclosed evidence linking them to drug trafficking, cartel activity, or any effort to reach the United States.
Legal experts warn that the US is now running an off-the-books killing program under the banner of drug interdiction, with almost none of the transparency required by domestic or international law.
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