Hegseth Says He Didn’t “Stick Around” for Second Strike, But Still Defends It

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday that he witnessed the initial strike in the U.S. military’s “double tap” attack on a boat in the Caribbean Sea in September, but had left the room before the second one because he was “busy.”

In a cabinet meeting, Hegseth doubled down on his defense of the “double tap” boat strike on September 2 — while still distancing himself from direct responsibility, which he continues to assign to Admiral Mitch Bradley, the commander overseeing the mission.

While Hegseth said that he “empowered” the military brass “to make that call,” he wasn’t present when the second strike was ordered.

“I want to be the one to make the call, after getting all the information, and make sure it’s the right strike, that was September 2nd,” he said, touting the amount of intelligence and analysis that goes into such a determination.

“I watched that first strike live. As you can imagine, at the Department of War, we’ve got a lot of things to do. So I didn’t stick around for the hour, two hours, whatever, where all of the sensitive sight exploitation digitally occurs. So I moved on to my next meeting,” he said.

Evidently, Hegseth did not feel the need to make the call for the second strike, which he and the White House say he left to Bradley.

The secretary said that he learned about the second strike “a couple of hours later,” adding that Bradley “had the complete authority” to carry it out. “And, by the way, Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat,” he said.

At the time that he left, the footage of the strike was unclear, he said, since “the thing was on fire,” which he labelled “fog of war.”

The Washington Post reported that footage of the vessel after the smoke cleared minutes later showed two people clinging onto the wreckage, which is when Bradley reportedly ordered the strike to ensure Hegseth’s alleged command to “kill everybody” was carried out. President Donald Trump posted the footage of the first strike on social media, but sources said that the administration has refrained from releasing footage of the survivors being killed because “people would be horrified” if they watched it.

Hegseth’s comments on Tuesday followed a post on X on Monday night, where he also laid the blame for the strike on Bradley.

“Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100 percent support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made — on the September 2 mission and all others since,” Hegseth wrote.

A wide-ranging slate of experts has repeatedly emphasized that the boat strike campaign is illegal. The Post’s story on the double tap strike has ignited concern that the U.S. is committing yet another layer of crimes in conducting its operation.

Illegality appears to be a secondary concern, at best, for Hegseth. Reporters noted on Tuesday that Hegseth railed on legal and ethical constraints put on soldiers in his 2024 book, The War on Warriors. In the book, he recalled a time when he told soldiers under his command in Iraq to disregard the advice of a military lawyer on the rules of engagement, referring to the judge advocate general’s corps, known as JAGs, as “jagoffs.”

After a briefing by a JAG detailing what makes an engagement legal, Hegseth wrote: “I pulled my platoon together, huddling amid their confusion to tell them, ‘I will not allow that nonsense to filter into your brains. Men, if you see an enemy who you believe is a threat, you engage and destroy the threat. That’s a bullshit rule that’s going to get people killed.’”

“If our warriors are forced to follow rules arbitrarily and asked to sacrifice more lives so that international tribunals feel better about themselves, aren’t we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules?! Who cares what other countries think,” he later wrote.