Pete Hegseth Delights in Violence

Even before Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had declared Alex Pretti a domestic terrorist, Pete Hegseth was online trashing his home state. Hegseth, who grew up north of Minneapolis, took to social media in the hours after masked immigration agents shot the ICU nurse with a stark calculation: “ICE > MN.”

“We have your back 100%. You are SAVING the country,” the Pentagon chief told immigration agents in an X post. “Shame on the leadership of Minnesota—and the lunatics in the street.” Hegseth didn’t define the we. He and fellow Cabinet members? The 1.3 million service members he commands? The troops he put on standby for potential deployment to Minneapolis? He hasn’t said. But if there was any doubt about how Hegseth would wield military might if troops were sent to check unrest or dissent in U.S. cities, there’s your answer.

Hegseth, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan as a National Guardsman before becoming a Fox News weekend host, has repeatedly blamed “woke” and “weak” military leaders for imposing overly restrictive rules of engagement that, he believes, cost U.S. lives and prolonged America’s “forever” wars. Since taking office, Hegseth has been an ardent supporter of Donald Trump’s expanded use of troops in U.S. cities and his aggressive immigration operations. When federal immigration agents surged into Minneapolis, Hegseth put troops on prepare-to-deploy orders in North Carolina and Alaska. Trump has also threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow troops to conduct law-enforcement activities.

In standing with ICE’s hard-line tactics against the citizens of Minnesota, Hegseth not only overstepped his jurisdiction as secretary of defense (he prefers to be called the “secretary of war”); he gave a glimpse of the belligerent approach he might take were those troops to be opposed by citizen protesters such as Pretti and Renee Good. It is one thing to defend your troops as they face enemies abroad. It is quite another to suggest that troops—or other armed government forces—have a free hand to do whatever they want on America’s streets to American citizens.

Asked about Hegseth’s comments, Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson said in an emailed statement that the secretary’s mission was to execute Trump’s orders and protect the United States: “We will do everything in our power to stop those who seek to harm Americans and the brave men and women defending our homeland.”

I’ve covered every secretary of defense since Bob Gates, who served George W. Bush and Barack Obama. No Pentagon chief then or since has embraced the jocular yet intimidating rhetoric that Hegseth has employed about the military’s use of violence. At times, uniformed leaders have spouted off in public. Jim Mattis, the retired Marine general whom Trump referred to as “Mad Dog,” made tough-guy quips about how “it’s fun to shoot some people” and the need to “have a plan to kill everyone you meet.” But Mattis turned out to be a check on—rather than an accelerant of—Trump’s most disruptive instincts. Pentagon leaders have almost always publicly couched the military’s use of violence in decorous euphemisms designed to show the solemnity of lethality. Insurgents are “eliminated” or “taken off the battlefield.” Public gloating, in an institution as storied and upright as the U.S. military, is viewed as unseemly.  

Not so for Hegseth. His tone and vocabulary regarding the use of force is gleeful, juvenile, and crude. He has posted doctored children’s-book covers that show a turtle named Franklin hanging out of a helicopter, shooting at drug boats. He embraced a phrase that the White House is now touting as Trump’s doctrine for the use of force: fuck around and find out. And he has celebrated lethal strikes on suspected drug traffickers in small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. After the initial strike in September, he told reporters, “I’d say we smoked a drug boat and there’s 11 narco-terrorists at the bottom of the ocean—and when other people try to do that, they’re gonna meet the same fate.” In November, hours after The Washington Post reported that commanders had killed two survivors of that strike, Hegseth posted, “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.” Hegseth has denied any wrongdoing by the military and has not announced any internal investigations or reviews.

Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller and the president himself employ similar cruelty when discussing what they see as America’s urban pathologies (Trump has described an “invasion from within” and said U.S. cities should be used as “training grounds” for the military). But it’s unusual, to say the least, for someone who sits in the top office at the Pentagon, a department focused on conflict outside the U.S. In theory, Hegseth is supposed to be setting an example for the world’s most powerful military, responsible for a large nuclear arsenal and the life-and-death decisions of a massive global force.

[Read: The wrath of Stephen Miller ]

Hegseth’s regular demonization of domestic opponents (the “lunatics” he referred to are the same American citizens the military is duty bound to protect) also gives a glimpse into how he would view the power dynamic were troops to be deployed domestically. (In contrast to Hegseth’s swagger, when Minnesota state leaders deployed the National Guard to assist local law enforcement this week, Guardsmen handed out coffee and doughnuts.)

Peter Feaver, an expert on civil-military relations at Duke University, told me that the top Pentagon officials responsible for the nation’s sons and daughters in service, and the weighty matters of war and peace, generally have tried to stay out of public political squabbles as much as possible. Hegseth, instead, “has adopted a messaging posture that breaks with that tradition, perhaps reflecting his own background as a partisan commentator on Fox News and thus his comfort with the hot takes and rapid-response mentality of that medium,” Feaver said. “Having the secretary be so prominent in partisan sparring can put pressure on the nonpartisan military, whose professional ethic requires them to stay out of the fray.”

Staying out of the fray is exactly what U.S. troops—National Guard and a small contingent of active-duty Marines—have done over the past year as the president and his allies deployed them to assist federal agents, fight crime, or respond to unrest in cities including Los Angeles, Memphis, and the nation’s capital. Military experts say that’s because military personnel have more extensive training and better discipline than ICE or Border Patrol agents.  

But Hegseth’s firing of the top Army, Navy, and Air Force lawyers suggests a different potential problem in any further domestic deployments, Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. Hegseth, who, before taking office, advocated for the lenient treatment of troops convicted of war crimes, might simply override the military-justice system if any violence occurs. “There’s always somebody who acts inappropriately, even criminally, in a moment of stress or frustration and needs to be held accountable,” Cancian said. “That will be a test.”

Hegseth’s attitude is rooted in his disillusionment and disappointment over his experience in Iraq, people who know him say. In his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth boasted about instructing members of the platoon he led to disregard their rules of engagement, a shocking admission and one that now looks especially ominous should the Trump administration deploy troops in new ways within the United States.

Hegseth described his time in the 101st Airborne’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team—the camaraderie, stress, and euphoria of combat—as transformational. He emulated then-Colonel Michael Steele, a Black Hawk Down veteran and brigade commander who he felt was wrongly held responsible for attacks on civilians that occurred under his watch, one of the people who know Hegseth told me.

Those rules of engagement are handed down from commanders who are advised by military lawyers, called judge advocates general. Their aim is to ensure that operations comply with U.S and international law.

Hegseth has dismissed JAGs as “jagoffs” and complained that their decisions led to U.S. troops “fighting with one hand behind our back” in Iraq and Afghanistan. “When you send Americans to war, their mandate should be to lethally dominate the battlefield,” he wrote. “Our enemies should get bullets, not attorneys.”

Hegseth’s approach at the Pentagon has reflected those convictions. Since taking over a year ago, Hegseth has fired top generals and flag officers and vowed to empower the trigger-pullers. Speaking to senior uniformed leaders he summoned to a Marine base in Virginia last fall, Hegseth said the military would fight wars to win, not to defend, and  would end “stupid” restrictions on the use of force. “We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country,” he told hundreds of officers. “No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement; just common sense, maximum lethality, and authority for warfighters.”

[Read: Pete Hegseth is the Pentagon’s holy warrior]

Hegseth has company among some other veterans of the post-9/11 wars in believing that restrictive rules of engagement led to the U.S. failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, because troops were prevented from killing more insurgents, Jason Dempsey, a former Army officer who served two years in Afghanistan, told me. Dempsey described Hegseth’s attitude this way: “There should be no standards on the battlefield because it’s all us versus them, black versus white, good versus evil, and there are no innocent or undecided people in between.”

The importance of projecting strength and toughness is a deeply held belief for Hegseth, one of the people who know him told me. At the same time, Hegseth takes his cues from Trump, whose support is key to him keeping his role. In recent days, the president has distanced himself from his subordinates’ hot-blooded response to Pretti’s death, and his “border czar” has promised to wind down the federal immigration surge in Minnesota. In this case, Hegseth may be out of step with what his boss now wants.