Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s has set out to restore a focus on lethality within the U.S. military. This obsession risks a focus on killing for killing’s sake, andsake and comes at the expense of strategic clarity. It also ignores the most salient lessons from the U.S. wars of the last quarter century. The United States did not lose in Iraq and Afghanistan because it was insufficiently lethal. Indeed, in both wars, the U.S. military inflicting massive numbers of casualties, on both combatants and non-combatants, while suffering far fewer casualties in its own ranks.
But war is supposed to serve a strategic objective, and the objectives sought in Iraq and Afghanistan were unattainable in light of the political realities on the ground in both countries. If the United States focuses on lethality without a consideration of strategy, it risks repeating the errors of the past.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has brought a simple philosophy to the Pentagon: the only concern for the American military is how effectively it can kill the enemy.
The goal of the Defense Department, says Hegseth, is “Lethality, lethality, lethality.” In a speech marking his first 100 days in office, he said, “Everything starts and ends with warriors in training and on the battlefield.”
Hegseth’s public statements – and actions – are dominated by this new mantra. Since taking office, he has pushed for budget cuts to “nonlethal operations” and closed offices focused on limiting civilian deaths. The talk of lethality has become so omnipresent in the Pentagon that a recent DoD press release summarizing congressional testimony by two combatant commanders used the word “lethal” or “lethality” a dozen times.
Operationally, Hegseth has removed limitations on military commanders, resulting in significantly more civilian casualties during the recent U.S. attacks on Houthi rebels in Yemen, and with little military impact. Moreover, Hegseth consistently defers to military commanders, giving them a free hand in developing and implementing attack plans. Hegseth’s philosophy, said one Pentagon insider, is “letting the generals do what they want.”
For someone who has derided “academic rules of engagement which have been tying the hands of our warfighters for too long,” and who, in Trump’s first term, lobbied for pardons on behalf of soldiers convicted of war crimes, these moves are hardly surprising.
But there is a more significant problem with Hegseth’s war-fighting focus: a near-complete disregard for strategy. Hegseth – and, to a lesser extent, Trump – are clear on how America should fight future wars, but less so on when, where, or why.
One central lesson from the post-9/11 wars is that lethality divorced from larger strategic considerations is a political and military loser.
In his confirmation hearings, Hegseth had little to say about national security strategy, the role of information technology, unmanned capabilities in the future of American warfighting, or even how to advance U.S. security interests in Asia or Europe. According to one Pentagon insider whom we spoke to, Hegseth simply doesn’t have an articulated worldview when it comes to military strategy. Hegseth spent so much time during his confirmation hearings defending his personal behavior that there was little time to talk about his vision for the Pentagon or the US military – and it shows.
Hegseth, who speaks with pride about getting “dust on his boots” as a trigger-puller in Iraq and Afghanistan, is discreetly focused on tactical matters. But if there is one lesson from the post-9/11 wars, it is that lethality divorced from larger strategic considerations is a political and military loser.
Successful wars are not defined solely by military victory, and victory doesn’t come from more effectively killing the enemy. Success entails achieving realistic and useful political objectives at a reasonable cost. America’s recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t fail because America didn’t kill enough Iraqis and Afghans – they failed because the strategy in both conflicts was poorly thought-out, unrealistic, and difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.
A predominant focus on tactics versus strategy risks not only learning the wrong lessons from the errors made in those two conflicts, but, even worse, repeating them in the future.
War On Law
Hegseth’s talk about diminished lethality has generally focused on the bogeyman of wokeness, the “left’s antiwarrior radicalism,” and DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion).
In The War on Warriors, Hegseth rails against “feminism, genderism, safetyism, climate worship, manufactured ‘violent extremism,’ straight-up weirdo shit, and a grab bag of social justice causes that infect today’s fighting force.” They are, he argues, “anathema to everything the American military stands for.”
Since taking office, Hegseth has sought to expel transgender soldiers from the military, shut down efforts to address climate change, and, in a ham-fisted manner, removed mentions of diversity from the Pentagon’s website (this effort led to the embarrassing deletion of a webpage honoring former Army veteran Jackie Robinson, among others).
But there is another even darker side to Hegseth’s worldview. He appears to believe that American troops are too wedded to “rules written by dignified men in mahogany rooms eighty years ago,” as he wrote in The War on Warriors.
“Modern war-fighters fight lawyers as much as we fight bad guys,” he writes. “Our enemies should get bullets, not attorneys.” In his view, “America should fight by its own rules.”
Hegseth has backed up his words with action. Before becoming Secretary of Defense, he was a fierce public advocate for American soldiers who had been charged or convicted of war crimes. Hegseth took up the cause of Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who had stabbed an injured 17-year-old Iraqi in the neck. He was turned in by his fellow SEALS, who called him “freaking evil.” Hegseth dubbed Gallagher a “hero.”
Hegseth also championed the cases of Matthew Golsteyn, a former Green Beret who was charged with murdering a detainee and later burning his body, and First Lieutenant Clint Lorance, who had ordered his unit to fire on unarmed civilians riding a motorcycle in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Lorance was sentenced to 19 years in the stockade at Fort Leavenworth. Eventually, Trump pardoned Golsteyn and Lorance and reversed a decision to demote Gallagher after he was acquitted of murder charges.
Hegseth says that when Americans fight wars, “We should fight to win or not fight at all” – a tacit nod to the Powell Doctrine of yore that encouraged policymakers to only fight wars they intended to win and with overwhelming military force. But while Powell was focused on the connection between military violence and political objectives, Hegseth focuses on violence alone. Wartime failures, from his perspective, are evidence only of insufficient ferocity.
“The fact that we won’t do what is necessary is why wars become endless,” says Hegseth. “Modern wars never end, because we won’t finish them.”
That argument, however, doesn’t align with the reality of those conflicts or the history of U.S. warfighting.
If there is a single defining characteristic of modern American wars, it is that the U.S. excels at killing enemy soldiers while suffering comparatively few casualties of its own. The United States lost more than 58,000 soldiers in Vietnam, the largest number of U.S. combat deaths since World War II. But that number pales in comparison to the estimated one million to 2.5 million military and non-military losses suffered by the North Vietnamese.
A single defining characteristic of modern American wars is that the U.S. excels at killing enemy soldiers while suffering comparatively few casualties of its own.
More recently, America suffered fewer than 2,500 battlefield deaths during the 20-year Afghanistan war – a figure far smaller than the estimated 60,000 to 100,000 Taliban fighters killed by American arms.
At the outset of the wars in which Hegseth fought, Afghanistan and Iraq, lethality defined the U.S. effort. In Afghanistan, a mere handful of Special Forces troops, working alongside the Northern Alliance, the country’s anti-Taliban military resistance, swept the Taliban and al Qaeda fighters off the battlefield in a matter of weeks.
The overwhelming might of American airpower contributed to the Taliban’s quick demise as U.S. bombers killed thousands of troops from the air. The group’s fighters were so awed by the fearsome power of American war machines that many simply dropped their weapons and walked away from the fight.
In Iraq, it took the U.S. military only a few weeks to destroy the Iraqi army, capture Baghdad, and end the reign of Saddam Hussein. In the face of overwhelming firepower and seemingly insurmountable odds, organized resistance to the U.S. advance quickly melted away.
But those swift military triumphs did not yield durable strategic victories. The problem was not the execution of these wars, but their aftermath.
In Afghanistan, the Bush administration barely devoted any energy to thinking about what a post-Taliban government would look like. Rather than seek rapprochement with the defeated Taliban, which would have broadened the legitimacy of the new government in Kabul, the U.S. military treated the defeated group no differently than the al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
While Hegseth says the U.S. military fought the Taliban with one hand tied behind its back, that was not the case in the first few years of the war. The U.S. waged war, often quite ferociously, to eliminate all remnants of the former regime.
These aggressive operations came at a cost. While Afghans were happy to be free of Taliban rule, the killing of innocent Afghan civilians, even inadvertently, raised public ire. So too did U.S. actions that offended or dishonored Afghan customs and norms. Within a few years, the Taliban capitalized on these anti-American sentiments to launch the insurgency that eventually toppled the hand-picked American regime in Kabul.
In Iraq, a similar strategic gap played out. The Bush administration gave scant thought to the post-conflict phase of the war and was little prepared for the widespread looting and score-settling that took place in the days after Saddam’s fall. U.S. officials quickly disbanded the Iraqi Army and the reigning Baathist Party, which contributed to the country’s dysfunction and spurred the civil war that quickly overwhelmed American troops.
Much of Hegseth’s criticisms of his time in the military focus on the adoption of population–centric counterinsurgency (COIN) during the Iraq insurgency, which called for more restrictive rules of engagement for U.S. troops, increased outreach to local communities, and greater attention to minimizing civilian casualties.
For all of Hegseth’s complaints about allegedly wishy-washy military tactics, the U.S. military never lost a battle in Iraq or Afghanistan, and it imposed far more casualties than it suffered.
But while the Iraqi surge was predicated on de-emphasizing lethality on the ground, the opposite occurred. During the surge’s first year, the number of Iraqis killed in U.S. airstrikes increased dramatically, as did the overall number of deaths of non-combatants at the hands of U.S. forces. Hegseth’s claim that a more “woke” approach to war-fighting is less violent is belied by the facts.
For all of Hegseth’s complaints about allegedly wishy-washy military tactics, the U.S. military never lost a battle in Iraq or Afghanistan, and it imposed far more casualties than it suffered.
But while in a place like Afghanistan the U.S. military could make the Afghan countryside a lethal place for enemy fighters (and civilians), it could not undo the Taliban’s strategic advantages: a safe haven in Pakistan, the lack of legitimacy and popular support for the government in Kabul, and the backlash from the U.S. military’s killing of Afghan civilians. Killing more Afghans would not have led to a different outcome; it just would have meant more needless loss of life.
Lethalizing the Pentagon
Since taking office, Hegseth has continued to operate as though every problem is a nail and he is wielding a hammer.
Hegseth has told the Pentagon workforce he wants the “biggest, bad ass military on the planet.” He announced $50 billion in budget cuts to non-lethal DOD activities, so, in his words, the Pentagon can get back to its core war-fighting mission. A recent memo from Deputy Secretary of Defense, Steven Feinberg, says that “Every civilian role should directly enable lethality, readiness, or strategic deterrence. If not, it should be reclassified, outsourced, or removed.”
Hegseth has closed the Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Office and the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, initiatives established to prevent the deaths of noncombatants during U.S. military operations. This action, along with the widespread firing of JAG officers, has fueled fears that, under his leadership, the U.S. military will be asked to commit unlawful acts that put civilians in harm’s way. Hegseth stated publicly that the removals were necessary so that there would be no “roadblocks to orders given by a commander-in-chief.”
But perhaps most ominously, Hegseth has loosened limitations on the use of military force.
Hegseth has loosened limitations on the use of military force.
Commanders in the field have been granted far greater leeway in targeting suspected combatants. During his first overseas trip in February, Hegseth “signed a directive easing policy constraints and executive oversight on airstrikes and the deployment of American commandos.” The move was, according to CBS News, intended to give “commanders greater latitude to decide whom to target while relaxing the multi-layered centralized control former President Joe Biden implemented over airstrikes and raids by American special operation forces.” (Hegseth confirmed the reporting on Twitter.)
In April, Gen. Michael Langley, the head of AFRICOM, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the expanded authorities granted by Hegseth meant, “We’re hitting them hard,” said Langley. “I now have the capability to hit them harder.” Whether this harder approach will decisively defeat al-Shabab or otherwise advance U.S. interests in the region is assumed but not proven. In fact, over the past several weeks, the group’s fighters have overrun several towns in Somalia, and there are growing fears that they could soon threaten the capital of Mogadishu.
In Yemen, Hegseth’s focus on lethality has had an even more direct impact.
Last year, when U.S. forces began attacking Houthi rebels in Yemen, Michael Kurilla, the head of United States Central Command, requested authority to conduct an eight-to-10-month campaign to eliminate Houthi air defense systems, followed by targeted assassinations of the group’s leaders.
The Biden administration denied the request, but Hegseth signed off on the plan. According to a recent report in Politico, “‘If the senior military guys come across as tough and warfighters, Hegseth is easily persuaded to their point of view’ … One of the people familiar with the dynamic between the CENTCOM commander and the Pentagon chief said they never saw Hegseth turn down a single one of Kurilla’s requests for more military assets.”
In the thirty days after Hegseth approved Kurilla’s campaign plan, the Houthis shot down seven American MQ-9 drones (around $30 million each), and several American F-16s and an F-35 fighter jet were nearly hit by Houthi air defenses. The Pentagon was spending $1 billion a month and using so many precision munitions that Pentagon officials grew increasingly concerned about dwindling U.S. stockpiles. Worst of all, there was little indication that the ramped-up military attacks significantly weakened the Houthis, who continued to fire at shipping in the Red Sea and shoot missiles into Israel.
By the end of April, Trump pulled the plug on the operation, declaring victory – but so did the Houthis, as they quickly spread a hashtag on social media that read “Yemen defeats America.”
Not surprisingly, Yemeni civilians paid the greatest price for Kurilla’s increased lethality.
Kurilla’s bombing campaign, which Hegseth dubbed Operation Rough Rider, caused more than 500 civilian casualties, including 158 deaths. By comparison, Operation Poseidon Archer, initiated by President Biden in January 2024 (which lasted for a year), resulted in only 85 casualties.
Kurilla, who has been dubbed “the Gorilla,” continues to enjoy Hegseth’s support and has turned his hawkish sights to Iran. According to reporting from Politico, as the Trump administration is debating US involvement in Israel’s ongoing attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Kurilla is playing a decisive role, as Hegseth has made little effort to rein him in.
Conclusion
Defenders of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy will argue that, unlike George W. Bush, who sent U.S. troops to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, Trump has made clear his disinclination to put American troops in harm’s way. But international events have a way of creating new realities. Trump’s decisions need to be reinforced by lessons learned from the nation’s recent wars, not his instincts. Indeed, Trump had for months opposed an Israeli attack on Iran, but after the operation’s initial success, he has done a 180 and is now considering joining forces with Israel. Trump has surrounded himself with a coterie of advisors, both realists and hawks. But at the Pentagon, he has a top official who, proudly and unashamedly, would rather shoot first and ask questions later. In just a few months in office, Hegseth has put his stamp on the military and ensured that lethality is more than a mantra; it’s a defining principle of the new Pentagon.
The most salient lesson from the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is that lethality devoid of strategic purpose, and a failure to consider the second- and third-order effects of using military force, is destined to fail. Pete Hegseth’s narrow focus on lethality and warfighting, with little consideration of strategy or what comes after military victory, risks ensuring that these same mistakes will be made again.
Michael Cohen is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic Studies for the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s has set out to restore a focus on lethality within the U.S. military. This obsession risks a focus on killing for killing’s sake, andsake and comes at the expense of strategic clarity. It also ignores the most salient lessons from the U.S. wars of the last quarter century. The United States did not lose in Iraq and Afghanistan because it was insufficiently lethal. Indeed, in both wars, the U.S. military inflicting massive numbers of casualties, on both combatants and non-combatants, while suffering far fewer casualties in its own ranks.
But war is supposed to serve a strategic objective, and the objectives sought in Iraq and Afghanistan were unattainable in light of the political realities on the ground in both countries. If the United States focuses on lethality without a consideration of strategy, it risks repeating the errors of the past.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has brought a simple philosophy to the Pentagon: the only concern for the American military is how effectively it can kill the enemy.
The goal of the Defense Department, says Hegseth, is “Lethality, lethality, lethality.” In a speech marking his first 100 days in office, he said, “Everything starts and ends with warriors in training and on the battlefield.”
Hegseth’s public statements – and actions – are dominated by this new mantra. Since taking office, he has pushed for budget cuts to “nonlethal operations” and closed offices focused on limiting civilian deaths. The talk of lethality has become so omnipresent in the Pentagon that a recent DoD press release summarizing congressional testimony by two combatant commanders used the word “lethal” or “lethality” a dozen times.
Operationally, Hegseth has removed limitations on military commanders, resulting in significantly more civilian casualties during the recent U.S. attacks on Houthi rebels in Yemen, and with little military impact. Moreover, Hegseth consistently defers to military commanders, giving them a free hand in developing and implementing attack plans. Hegseth’s philosophy, said one Pentagon insider, is “letting the generals do what they want.”
For someone who has derided “academic rules of engagement which have been tying the hands of our warfighters for too long,” and who, in Trump’s first term, lobbied for pardons on behalf of soldiers convicted of war crimes, these moves are hardly surprising.
But there is a more significant problem with Hegseth’s war-fighting focus: a near-complete disregard for strategy. Hegseth – and, to a lesser extent, Trump – are clear on how America should fight future wars, but less so on when, where, or why.
One central lesson from the post-9/11 wars is that lethality divorced from larger strategic considerations is a political and military loser.
In his confirmation hearings, Hegseth had little to say about national security strategy, the role of information technology, unmanned capabilities in the future of American warfighting, or even how to advance U.S. security interests in Asia or Europe. According to one Pentagon insider whom we spoke to, Hegseth simply doesn’t have an articulated worldview when it comes to military strategy. Hegseth spent so much time during his confirmation hearings defending his personal behavior that there was little time to talk about his vision for the Pentagon or the US military – and it shows.
Hegseth, who speaks with pride about getting “dust on his boots” as a trigger-puller in Iraq and Afghanistan, is discreetly focused on tactical matters. But if there is one lesson from the post-9/11 wars, it is that lethality divorced from larger strategic considerations is a political and military loser.
Successful wars are not defined solely by military victory, and victory doesn’t come from more effectively killing the enemy. Success entails achieving realistic and useful political objectives at a reasonable cost. America’s recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t fail because America didn’t kill enough Iraqis and Afghans – they failed because the strategy in both conflicts was poorly thought-out, unrealistic, and difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.
A predominant focus on tactics versus strategy risks not only learning the wrong lessons from the errors made in those two conflicts, but, even worse, repeating them in the future.
War On Law
Hegseth’s talk about diminished lethality has generally focused on the bogeyman of wokeness, the “left’s antiwarrior radicalism,” and DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion).
In The War on Warriors, Hegseth rails against “feminism, genderism, safetyism, climate worship, manufactured ‘violent extremism,’ straight-up weirdo shit, and a grab bag of social justice causes that infect today’s fighting force.” They are, he argues, “anathema to everything the American military stands for.”
Since taking office, Hegseth has sought to expel transgender soldiers from the military, shut down efforts to address climate change, and, in a ham-fisted manner, removed mentions of diversity from the Pentagon’s website (this effort led to the embarrassing deletion of a webpage honoring former Army veteran Jackie Robinson, among others).
But there is another even darker side to Hegseth’s worldview. He appears to believe that American troops are too wedded to “rules written by dignified men in mahogany rooms eighty years ago,” as he wrote in The War on Warriors.
“Modern war-fighters fight lawyers as much as we fight bad guys,” he writes. “Our enemies should get bullets, not attorneys.” In his view, “America should fight by its own rules.”
Hegseth has backed up his words with action. Before becoming Secretary of Defense, he was a fierce public advocate for American soldiers who had been charged or convicted of war crimes. Hegseth took up the cause of Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who had stabbed an injured 17-year-old Iraqi in the neck. He was turned in by his fellow SEALS, who called him “freaking evil.” Hegseth dubbed Gallagher a “hero.”
Hegseth also championed the cases of Matthew Golsteyn, a former Green Beret who was charged with murdering a detainee and later burning his body, and First Lieutenant Clint Lorance, who had ordered his unit to fire on unarmed civilians riding a motorcycle in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Lorance was sentenced to 19 years in the stockade at Fort Leavenworth. Eventually, Trump pardoned Golsteyn and Lorance and reversed a decision to demote Gallagher after he was acquitted of murder charges.
Hegseth says that when Americans fight wars, “We should fight to win or not fight at all” – a tacit nod to the Powell Doctrine of yore that encouraged policymakers to only fight wars they intended to win and with overwhelming military force. But while Powell was focused on the connection between military violence and political objectives, Hegseth focuses on violence alone. Wartime failures, from his perspective, are evidence only of insufficient ferocity.
“The fact that we won’t do what is necessary is why wars become endless,” says Hegseth. “Modern wars never end, because we won’t finish them.”
That argument, however, doesn’t align with the reality of those conflicts or the history of U.S. warfighting.
If there is a single defining characteristic of modern American wars, it is that the U.S. excels at killing enemy soldiers while suffering comparatively few casualties of its own. The United States lost more than 58,000 soldiers in Vietnam, the largest number of U.S. combat deaths since World War II. But that number pales in comparison to the estimated one million to 2.5 million military and non-military losses suffered by the North Vietnamese.
A single defining characteristic of modern American wars is that the U.S. excels at killing enemy soldiers while suffering comparatively few casualties of its own.
More recently, America suffered fewer than 2,500 battlefield deaths during the 20-year Afghanistan war – a figure far smaller than the estimated 60,000 to 100,000 Taliban fighters killed by American arms.
At the outset of the wars in which Hegseth fought, Afghanistan and Iraq, lethality defined the U.S. effort. In Afghanistan, a mere handful of Special Forces troops, working alongside the Northern Alliance, the country’s anti-Taliban military resistance, swept the Taliban and al Qaeda fighters off the battlefield in a matter of weeks.
The overwhelming might of American airpower contributed to the Taliban’s quick demise as U.S. bombers killed thousands of troops from the air. The group’s fighters were so awed by the fearsome power of American war machines that many simply dropped their weapons and walked away from the fight.
In Iraq, it took the U.S. military only a few weeks to destroy the Iraqi army, capture Baghdad, and end the reign of Saddam Hussein. In the face of overwhelming firepower and seemingly insurmountable odds, organized resistance to the U.S. advance quickly melted away.
But those swift military triumphs did not yield durable strategic victories. The problem was not the execution of these wars, but their aftermath.
In Afghanistan, the Bush administration barely devoted any energy to thinking about what a post-Taliban government would look like. Rather than seek rapprochement with the defeated Taliban, which would have broadened the legitimacy of the new government in Kabul, the U.S. military treated the defeated group no differently than the al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
While Hegseth says the U.S. military fought the Taliban with one hand tied behind its back, that was not the case in the first few years of the war. The U.S. waged war, often quite ferociously, to eliminate all remnants of the former regime.
These aggressive operations came at a cost. While Afghans were happy to be free of Taliban rule, the killing of innocent Afghan civilians, even inadvertently, raised public ire. So too did U.S. actions that offended or dishonored Afghan customs and norms. Within a few years, the Taliban capitalized on these anti-American sentiments to launch the insurgency that eventually toppled the hand-picked American regime in Kabul.
In Iraq, a similar strategic gap played out. The Bush administration gave scant thought to the post-conflict phase of the war and was little prepared for the widespread looting and score-settling that took place in the days after Saddam’s fall. U.S. officials quickly disbanded the Iraqi Army and the reigning Baathist Party, which contributed to the country’s dysfunction and spurred the civil war that quickly overwhelmed American troops.
Much of Hegseth’s criticisms of his time in the military focus on the adoption of population–centric counterinsurgency (COIN) during the Iraq insurgency, which called for more restrictive rules of engagement for U.S. troops, increased outreach to local communities, and greater attention to minimizing civilian casualties.
For all of Hegseth’s complaints about allegedly wishy-washy military tactics, the U.S. military never lost a battle in Iraq or Afghanistan, and it imposed far more casualties than it suffered.
But while the Iraqi surge was predicated on de-emphasizing lethality on the ground, the opposite occurred. During the surge’s first year, the number of Iraqis killed in U.S. airstrikes increased dramatically, as did the overall number of deaths of non-combatants at the hands of U.S. forces. Hegseth’s claim that a more “woke” approach to war-fighting is less violent is belied by the facts.
For all of Hegseth’s complaints about allegedly wishy-washy military tactics, the U.S. military never lost a battle in Iraq or Afghanistan, and it imposed far more casualties than it suffered.
But while in a place like Afghanistan the U.S. military could make the Afghan countryside a lethal place for enemy fighters (and civilians), it could not undo the Taliban’s strategic advantages: a safe haven in Pakistan, the lack of legitimacy and popular support for the government in Kabul, and the backlash from the U.S. military’s killing of Afghan civilians. Killing more Afghans would not have led to a different outcome; it just would have meant more needless loss of life.
Lethalizing the Pentagon
Since taking office, Hegseth has continued to operate as though every problem is a nail and he is wielding a hammer.
Hegseth has told the Pentagon workforce he wants the “biggest, bad ass military on the planet.” He announced $50 billion in budget cuts to non-lethal DOD activities, so, in his words, the Pentagon can get back to its core war-fighting mission. A recent memo from Deputy Secretary of Defense, Steven Feinberg, says that “Every civilian role should directly enable lethality, readiness, or strategic deterrence. If not, it should be reclassified, outsourced, or removed.”
Hegseth has closed the Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Office and the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, initiatives established to prevent the deaths of noncombatants during U.S. military operations. This action, along with the widespread firing of JAG officers, has fueled fears that, under his leadership, the U.S. military will be asked to commit unlawful acts that put civilians in harm’s way. Hegseth stated publicly that the removals were necessary so that there would be no “roadblocks to orders given by a commander-in-chief.”
But perhaps most ominously, Hegseth has loosened limitations on the use of military force.
Hegseth has loosened limitations on the use of military force.
Commanders in the field have been granted far greater leeway in targeting suspected combatants. During his first overseas trip in February, Hegseth “signed a directive easing policy constraints and executive oversight on airstrikes and the deployment of American commandos.” The move was, according to CBS News, intended to give “commanders greater latitude to decide whom to target while relaxing the multi-layered centralized control former President Joe Biden implemented over airstrikes and raids by American special operation forces.” (Hegseth confirmed the reporting on Twitter.)
In April, Gen. Michael Langley, the head of AFRICOM, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the expanded authorities granted by Hegseth meant, “We’re hitting them hard,” said Langley. “I now have the capability to hit them harder.” Whether this harder approach will decisively defeat al-Shabab or otherwise advance U.S. interests in the region is assumed but not proven. In fact, over the past several weeks, the group’s fighters have overrun several towns in Somalia, and there are growing fears that they could soon threaten the capital of Mogadishu.
In Yemen, Hegseth’s focus on lethality has had an even more direct impact.
Last year, when U.S. forces began attacking Houthi rebels in Yemen, Michael Kurilla, the head of United States Central Command, requested authority to conduct an eight-to-10-month campaign to eliminate Houthi air defense systems, followed by targeted assassinations of the group’s leaders.
The Biden administration denied the request, but Hegseth signed off on the plan. According to a recent report in Politico, “‘If the senior military guys come across as tough and warfighters, Hegseth is easily persuaded to their point of view’ … One of the people familiar with the dynamic between the CENTCOM commander and the Pentagon chief said they never saw Hegseth turn down a single one of Kurilla’s requests for more military assets.”
In the thirty days after Hegseth approved Kurilla’s campaign plan, the Houthis shot down seven American MQ-9 drones (around $30 million each), and several American F-16s and an F-35 fighter jet were nearly hit by Houthi air defenses. The Pentagon was spending $1 billion a month and using so many precision munitions that Pentagon officials grew increasingly concerned about dwindling U.S. stockpiles. Worst of all, there was little indication that the ramped-up military attacks significantly weakened the Houthis, who continued to fire at shipping in the Red Sea and shoot missiles into Israel.
By the end of April, Trump pulled the plug on the operation, declaring victory – but so did the Houthis, as they quickly spread a hashtag on social media that read “Yemen defeats America.”
Not surprisingly, Yemeni civilians paid the greatest price for Kurilla’s increased lethality.
Kurilla’s bombing campaign, which Hegseth dubbed Operation Rough Rider, caused more than 500 civilian casualties, including 158 deaths. By comparison, Operation Poseidon Archer, initiated by President Biden in January 2024 (which lasted for a year), resulted in only 85 casualties.
Kurilla, who has been dubbed “the Gorilla,” continues to enjoy Hegseth’s support and has turned his hawkish sights to Iran. According to reporting from Politico, as the Trump administration is debating US involvement in Israel’s ongoing attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Kurilla is playing a decisive role, as Hegseth has made little effort to rein him in.
Conclusion
Defenders of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy will argue that, unlike George W. Bush, who sent U.S. troops to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, Trump has made clear his disinclination to put American troops in harm’s way. But international events have a way of creating new realities. Trump’s decisions need to be reinforced by lessons learned from the nation’s recent wars, not his instincts. Indeed, Trump had for months opposed an Israeli attack on Iran, but after the operation’s initial success, he has done a 180 and is now considering joining forces with Israel. Trump has surrounded himself with a coterie of advisors, both realists and hawks. But at the Pentagon, he has a top official who, proudly and unashamedly, would rather shoot first and ask questions later. In just a few months in office, Hegseth has put his stamp on the military and ensured that lethality is more than a mantra; it’s a defining principle of the new Pentagon.
The most salient lesson from the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is that lethality devoid of strategic purpose, and a failure to consider the second- and third-order effects of using military force, is destined to fail. Pete Hegseth’s narrow focus on lethality and warfighting, with little consideration of strategy or what comes after military victory, risks ensuring that these same mistakes will be made again.
Michael Cohen is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic Studies for the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University
