Hegseth Feels the Heat

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, December 02, 2025

 

Although the seemingly contradictory reports, from the Washington Post and the New York Times, about the alleged September 2 double-tap U.S. air strike on Venezuelan drug couriers seem irreconcilable, there are points of agreement. The Post’s most controversial assertion, supported only by anonymous sources, is that Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth not only ordered the second strike on the boat’s incapacitated crew but did so with wanton disregard for U.S. law and international convention. More compellingly, the Times maintains that Hegseth did not have input at the operational level (which would be reasonable for a cabinet-level official) but he did give the orders on which his subordinates acted.

 

That still leaves us with several unsettling questions. Did Hegseth’s orders include a directive to kill survivors? Was U.S. Navy Admiral Frank Bradley improvising when the strikes occurred (as the administration now, belatedly, admits they did)? What kind of reaction did this inspire inside the Pentagon? If the yet unexplained resignation of onetime U.S. Southern Command deputy commander Admiral Alvin Holsey, in October, and the unexplained repatriation of survivors of drug-boat strikes are any indication, there was some potentially significant consternation inside the building after September 2.

 

For his part, Secretary Hegseth insists that he stands foursquare behind Admiral Bradley, . . . who totally did it.

 

 

That’s his story, and he stuck to it during a televised cabinet meeting on Tuesday in the White House:

 

 

That’s a rather abrupt departure from the flippant bravado Hegseth initially deployed when the news of the scandalous air strikes first broke. That’s the sort of thing that typically would have scared Republican lawmakers away from asking too many questions about any controversy involving Trump administration officials. But GOP lawmakers are not backing down — not yet anyway.

 

“It’s a long-held rule that survivors of the ship attack are no longer combatants, and an air crew member in a parachute is no longer a combatant. You’re out of the fight,” said Senator Lindsey Graham. “I don’t know what the facts are, but that’s general law.”

 

When asked about the basic allegations, Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker promised a thorough congressional investigation that will subpoena “all of the audio and all of the video.” But “obviously, if that occurred,” Congressman Mike Turner said of the facts as they’ve been reported, “that would be very serious, and I agree that that would be an illegal act.”

 

“We take seriously the reports of follow-on strikes on boats alleged to be ferrying narcotics in the SOUTHCOM region and are taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question,” said Alabama Republican Congressman Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, in a joint statement with his committee’s ranking member, Democratic Representative Adam Smith.

 

Perhaps most ominously, when asked about his confidence in Hegseth’s leadership, Senate Majority Leader John Thune politely abstained from offering an opinion. “I don’t have, at this point, I guess, an evaluation of the secretary,” Thune told reporters. “Others can make those evaluations.”

 

It is, in fact, Congress’s job to conduct that very evaluation. Its members seem reluctant to do just that.