Why The Attempted Takedown Of Pete Hegseth Was Doomed From The Start
And will not end well for his enemies in Washington
The same people who propelled Russiagate on Twitter are insisting today on X that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has thrown Adm. Mitch Bradley (see photo) under the proverbial bus by calling him “an American hero, a true professional” who “has my 100% support” for “the combat decisions he has made — on the September 2 mission and all others since.” Praise is now a hostile act, apparently.
This might be confusing to normal readers, so I shall explain. When Pete Hegseth gives the admiral credit for the successful counter-narco operation, he is blaming the admiral for the big, stupid fuss that people literally made up whole cloth about the OP. Next, Sec. Hegseth will pin a medal on Adm. Bradley for his excellent service, and Alexander Vindman will try to convince you it is a payoff for covering up the big, stupid, nonsensical fuss that he, Mr. Vindman, has taken part in blowing up. See how that works?
Rumor has it that Sec. Hegseth wants to sue the Washington Post, effectively forcing Jeff Bezos to do something about his newspaper. Democrats say they want Adm. Bradley to appear before Congress. They should be careful what they wish for, but of course it is now too late, for they spent weeks building up to what they had thought was going to be the end of Pete Hegseth. Now they are stuck with the outcome they ought to have seen coming, and avoided. There are too many people already too invested in the false narrative.
It is worth noting that this time, The New York Times has debunked the Post story. Nature is healing. Personally, I cannot wait to watch the admiral’s sworn testimony. I expect him to blow up a few popular Bluesky narratives with verbal double tap strikes using explosive facts. I shall have popcorn ready, and the X app open, to watch Vindman and company melt down in real time. They will, because this was never going to work.
It was never going to work because striking a boat full of deadly cargo in the water is a legal act of war, whether or not there are survivors clinging to the wreckage of the boat after the previous strike. This was always true, and efforts to pretend otherwise were doomed to fail as a prosecution project from the beginning even if the putative survivors were targeted, because counter to what some people would have us believe, the laws of war allow warriors to, you know, actually kill the enemy.
“Double-tapping is the practice of firing into bodies, regardless of their current participation in hostilities, for the purpose of making sure the targets are dead”, federal court clerk Stephen W. Simpson explained for The West Virginia Law Review in 2006. “While the laws of war do not expressly prohibit the practice, they do limit it — offering protection for the wounded and dead while enabling soldiers to protect themselves by shooting those still engaged in hostilities.”
The United States considers itself at war with narcoterror organizations, right now, including state-sponsored ones. If such a person was captured, and then executed summarily, that could be a war crime. If such a person is wounded in a tactical setting, and an American operator makes sure that he is dead while clearing the scene, it is absolutely not a war crime. It is war. People who say otherwise are lying. Ask why.
“Double-tapping has been used throughout history for many reasons: tactics, fear, hatred, safety, economics, and mercy”, Simpson writes. Mercy? Yes. A fragmentation warhead perforates its fleshy targets. Anyone who survives such a blast long enough to cling to the wreckage of a boat will already be bleeding and almost certainly be dead, if not shark food, by the time any rescuers arrive from any distance. Furthermore, the cartel could attempt to rescue the drugs themselves, and could be armed, potentially turning a simple strike mission into a battle. Why should any American take any risks for the life of a Tren de Aragua drug trafficker?
As a concept, double tapping goes back to the beginnings of warfare and the club used to dispatch a disabled foe. Bayonets are a double tap device, existing mainly to finish an enemy who is already helpless. It happens because every battlefield ever will have someone playing dead or innocent, every time. As Simpson recalls, Americans entering Baghdad in 2003 immediately encountered ‘dead’ and ‘wounded’ Iraqis who leapt up, miraculously recovered, to shoot at the Americans, who promptly adapted to this tactic by making sure every ‘dead’ and ‘wounded’ Iraqi they saw was in fact totally, completely dead before moving on. ‘Take no prisoners’ is not inhumane, it is self-care.
I also explained the calculus of death around the ‘go-fast boat’ in a recent essay for premium subscribers before the current nontroversy broke. Hopefully, the admiral can indicate whether fentanyl was known to be on board. If so, then his actions likely saved hundreds of American lives, which is why these strikes are in fact very popular with the American people. Democrats are trying to go against public opinion on this, and I submit their attempt to set this scandal up as a referendum on Trump’s presidency will backfire once the admiral has spoken for himself.
As I said in my previous essay, the most likely missile used to strike a go-fast boat would either be an AGM-114 Hellfire — famously used on land targets by American drones through four administrations — or an AGM-65 Maverick, which is three times as big and carries a far bigger payload. Now I suspect that Adm. Bradley, the man who actually oversaw the operation, including “several follow-up strikes that killed the initial survivors and sank the disabled boat” (emphasis added), was using the smaller munitions.
The difference between the two missiles is not small. Hellfire has a number of variants built specifically for low explosive yield, ostensibly to spare innocent lives. One variant, the AGM-114R9X, is built with metal blades instead of an explosive warhead to achieve the absolute minimum ‘collateral damage’. I look forward to learning more about Bradley’s choices, and what effects he wanted to achieve.
Contrary to the flawed hit job of initial reporting on this ‘scandal’, the admiral was not taking direct orders from Hegseth at the time, nor had Hegseth told him to kill survivors, nor was Hegseth watching any surveillance video during the strikes, according to everyone involved. To anyone who understands the real Pentagon one bit, the idea that a cabinet secretary personally oversaw the mission details never made any sense in the first place. Pete Hegseth is many things, but never a micromanager.
Admirals exist to do the operational planning and execution. Admirals literally have no other reason to exist. Some of the people who pushed this story hardest knew that, and are all the more deeply dishonest for it, indeed Vindman is far more familiar with the way this really works than your humble author is. He has no excuse.
For all of the innovation and bureaucracy built up to make it ‘safe’, the drone war killed thousands of people during the Obama presidency, some number of them innocent of any crime, with many of those strikes being ‘double taps’. More to the point, this project to make the double tap illegal has been going on since at least 2009 and the first double tap drone strike. Rather than a conspiracy of the ‘deep state’, it is a controversy within the deep state. We are seeing it come to the surface in this fake scandal.
Hegseth is clearly on one side of that controversy. For warriors like Hegseth, double tapping is perfectly natural and sensible. For the lawyers in uniform that Hegseth despises, and that despise him back, OP Southern Spear reverses two decades of efforts to tame the drone strike dragon.
According to The New York Times, the Obama administration appears to have conducted its very first double tap strike in May of 2009, killing 25 “militants”. While Trump used double tap strikes in the AFPAK conflict zone, they paused after 2018. Biden issued new rules, wanting zero civilian casualties, in 2023, two years after the botched exit from Afghanistan and the controversial 29 August 2021 drone strike that killed a family, which the White House declared a successful revenge for a suicide bombing.
Crucially, many of the Obama-era strikes deliberately targeted ‘first responders’ in tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, places where the ‘ambulance’ consists of their fellow fighters coming to help in an SUV. In this sense, the Obama-era double tap drone strike vaguely resembled the frequent double tap strikes by Russian drones and missiles on civilian targets in Ukraine today, targeting the firefighters and paramedics who risk their lives to save others. While to battle-minded people, the two situations are obviously not exactly equivalent, that difference is never obvious to the kind of legal warriors who leaked this story in its first, most garbled form to smear Hegseth.
Battle stress inhibits clear rational thinking and petty legalisms. A soldier will operate on muscle memory and instinct and emotion, making decisions from the heuristics of battle trained into him rather than the words he read in the rules of engagement training manual. This is as true for the drone warrior as anyone else. Hegseth understands this. It is one of the reasons he is so insanely popular with the veterans community. He gets their frustration.
Hegseth’s enemies, on the other hand, have picked the wrong side of a tactical debate that must always resolve against them, every time. “It is interesting to note that while the laws of war have become increasingly complex, the practice of double-tapping has not appeared to wane”, Simpson wrote two decades ago. “Most likely, this failure is not necessarily the result of an ineffective legal regime.” We cannot lawyer our way out of the problem. “Rather, it probably results from the realities of policing and enforcing a battlefield tactic practiced by individual soldiers which, depending on the specific circumstances of a confrontation, may or may not be legitimate.”
Like militants in the hills of Afghanistan, Tren de Aragua members are not regular legal combatants respecting the Geneva Conventions. Chivalrous rules of engagement just get Americans killed. Drone strikes seemed to be an elegant solution to the ROE problem. A target could be positively identified; a targeting cell could take the time to deconflict the target with the State Department and FBI and CIA; then observation and planning could catch the target on his way to a meeting with his bodyguards instead of his family, minimizing casualties. In the ideal, drone warfare created time and space to think, plan, act intelligently.
In practice, this form of warfare turned out to be a PTSD nightmare. Not only were the drone operators under intense mission stress for longer periods of time, but all too often, the strike could and would go wrong anyway, kill the wrong people, leave someone horribly wounded without hope of rescue, while the drone operators were forced to watch them die, perhaps burning, perhaps bleeding out, perhaps for hours, sometimes wishing the whole time that they could end the suffering on the screen with a second strike.
We may get a testimony double-header about this, but I doubt it. Speculation swirls around Adm. Alvin Holsey, who suddenly resigned as head of Southern Command six weeks ago. At least one Democrat, Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, remarked that his resignation was unusual. The administration lauded the admiral on his way out, but according to Eric Schmitt and Tyler Pager at the NYT, “officials at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill said the praise masked real policy tensions concerning Venezuela that the admiral and his civilian boss were seeking to paper over.”
Guess what, admirals are supposed to take orders from the civilians. They are also supposed to resign if they feel their political judgment about their orders is so superior to that of the cabinet secretary or the president that someone else ought to be in their place. Democrats are free to call Adm. Holsey before Congress and ask him leading questions about Trump administration policy if they want, but I do not think it will reveal anything helpful to their cause, and will likely hurt them.
Despite the gallant spin of Vindman and company, Operation Smear Hegseth has already failed. Further attempts to ‘win’ his firing, resignation, or indictment regarding OP Southern Spear can only ever compound this failure. Washington elites hate Hegseth for the same reason they hate Trump. He is declassé, to them. His talk of lethality, his high standards of performance for the egos that wear the stars on their shoulders, are an absolute delight to the ‘flyover country’ recruits that the Beltway elites despise. For a moment, some of them thought they could take him down. Contempt for the enemy is dangerous, though, and they miscalculated, and now it is all going to blow back on them.
