Pentagon personnel have been aiming to increase the lethality of troops for decades now, under the assumption that this will naturally result in military victory. The latest public figure to promote lethality is President Donald Trump’s recently confirmed secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth. The basic idea underlying Lethality First is that “the good guys” need to kill “the bad guys,” and the sooner and more efficiently this is done, the better. Lethality, it is believed, must be maximized in order to save the lives of allied soldiers and civilians. Commitment to this creed was not diminished by the highly lethal debacle in Vietnam, nor the disastrous Global War on Terror, because Lethality Firsters always insist that any and every defeat is caused by a failure to have maximized lethality.
Modern weapons of war, beginning with the machine gun, were developed with the intention of making the ugly job of killing swifter and more efficient, while preserving the lives of allied troops. But at some point lethality became a kind of telos for people in the defense sector, who consider it obvious that lethality is a good thing, in and of itself. Which is strange, because the very same people, when asked, will readily aver that murder is bad. The difference is that they regard the acts of homicide which they perpetrate—or aid and abet—as necessary, indeed, perhaps even noble. This is why it is not uncommon to hear not only military industry profiteers but also politicians and bureaucrats, who do not appear to be psychopaths, gushing about “lethality.”
Hegseth served in combat on the ground in Iraq and also deployed to Afghanistan, and has been touted by his supporters as an “out of the box” choice to head up the Department of Defense. His predecessor, General Lloyd Austin, served on the board of Raytheon before becoming Biden’s secretary of defense. While claiming to be an outsider set to radically reform the Pentagon, Hegseth nonetheless insists that defense spending which falls below 3% of the GDP constitutes, in and of itself, a threat to national defense, which he seems to believe is somehow axiomatic. Hegseth differs from Austin primarily in intending to eliminate the “woke” agenda from the military, focusing on merit-based appointments and ending DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) policies.
In the opening statement of his January 14, 2025, confirmation hearing, Hegseth explained, “[Trump], like me, wants a Pentagon laser-focused on lethality, meritocracy, war fighting, accountability and readiness.” Lethality was listed first among the objectives. A few moments later Hegseth mentioned lethality again: “We share the same goals: a ready, lethal military…”
Throughout the proceedings, lethality was also brought up in exchanges with committee members. Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) interrogated Hegseth about his support for pardons of convicted war criminals who had been turned in by their fellow soldiers: “Your definition of lethality seems to embrace those people who do commit war crimes rather than those who stand up and say, ‘This is not right.’” Hegseth replied:
“I’ve thought very deeply about the balance between legality and lethality, ensuring that the men and women on the front lines have the opportunity to destroy with and close [sic] the enemy and that lawyers aren’t the ones getting in the way…I’m talking about restrictive rules of engagement that these men and women behind me understand, they’ve lived with on the battlefield, which has made it more difficult to defeat our enemies.”
Nothing is more lethal (and expensive) than a nuclear arsenal, and Senator Deb Fischer (R-NE) asked Hegseth to affirm the importance of the nuclear triad:
“…nuclear weapons are foundational to our national defense and having a safe, effective, and credible nuclear deterrent underpins our alliances and as you know, it deters our adversaries. Nuclear deterrence has been, and you and I believe agreed on this, must continue to be unequivocally the highest priority mission of the Department of Defense…If confirmed, will you commit to supporting all three legs of the nuclear triad and to using every tool available to deliver these systems on schedule?”
Replying as though the USSR had never dissolved, Hegseth affirmed, “Senator, yes, I do because ultimately our deterrence, our survival is reliant upon the perception and the reality of the capability of our nuclear triad. We have to invest in its modernization for the defense of our nation.” In his series of questions, Senator Fischer did not neglect to mention lethality: “You’ve spoken about increasing lethality, you’ve spoken about getting programs done faster.” In the mindset of Lethality Firsters, WMD programs are good and need to be accelerated, provided only that they are controlled by the U.S. government.
Hegseth was grilled by Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) regarding the secretary’s views on women in the military and whether he would continue the Women, Peace, and Security initiative at the Department of Defense. He responded, “Senator, I will commit to reviewing that program and ensuring it aligns with America First national security priorities: meritocracy, lethality, and readiness…”
After some outbursts by protestors against the U.S. government’s support of Israel’s relentless assault on the inhabitants of Gaza, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) took the opportunity to intone, “I think this one was a member of Code Pink, which by the way is a Chinese Communist front group these days, said that you support Israel’s war in Gaza. I support Israel’s existential war in Gaza. I assume like me and President Trump, you support that war as well, don’t you?” Hegseth replied, “Senator, I do. I support Israel destroying and killing every last member of Hamas.”
In reality, many of the worst problems during the Global War on Terror were direct consequences of the very same Draconian, “take off the gloves” and “no holds barred,” approach. The preemptive invasion of Iraq was claimed by officials to be necessary in order to thwart what turned out to be Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent WMD programs and arsenals. The blame for the millions of lives destroyed or degraded and the many millions more persons left bereft does not rest solely with George W. Bush, however. He consulted with the top military brass and industry leaders in deciding what to do.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had served in the 1991 Gulf War, the first U.S. war on Iraq, was appointed the top diplomat of the United States in the Bush Jr. administration, not despite, but because of statements such as this: “Light and lethal is good. But you also need heavy and lethal.” Although, to his credit, Powell expressed some reservations in 2002 about what would become the 2003 invasion, he soon came around (by hook or by crook…) to the neoconservative plan, ignominiously serving as one of the staunchest public advocates of the ill-fated scheme. Before the United Nations General Assembly, Powell attempted, but failed, to persuade member states to support the U.S. government’s proposed military intervention in Iraq. The invasion proceeded nonetheless unimpeded because team Lethality First had set its sights on the Middle East for years, and the attacks of September 11, 2001 provided them with the opportunity to take action in the name of national defense.
On his way out the door, Joe Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken somewhat surprisingly announced during an address to the Atlantic Council on January 14, 2025 that the Israeli government had not effectively contained Hamas but instead created new recruits throughout the repeated assaults on Gaza since October 7, 2023:
“Each time Israel completes its military operations and pulls back Hamas, militants regroup and reemerge because there’s nothing else to fill the void. Indeed, we assess that Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost. That is a recipe for an enduring insurgency and perpetual war.”
This statement by Blinken is noteworthy for being a rare acknowledgment by him of the truth, that lethality is not a strategy but a tactic, and that violence leads inevitably to more violence. A ceasefire agreement between the Israeli government and Hamas was timed to coincide with Biden’s last day in office, perhaps because Blinken wanted to take credit for what was plausibly Trump’s success in getting the two sides to accede to a hostage-for-prisoner swap. Trump had ominously proclaimed “There will be hell to pay!” if the hostages were not released by the time he assumed the presidency.
From the beginning, critics have pointed out the similarity between the ruinous 2003 war on Iraq and the Israeli government’s massacre of thousands of innocent persons while ostensibly in pursuit of a much smaller number of Hamas members responsible for what happened on October 7, 2023. The two cases are analogous because the U.S. government committed mass homicide in Afghanistan and Iraq in pursuit of a small number of Al Qaeda members responsible for what happened on September 11, 2001. The implications of this similarity have somehow escaped the attention of the new secretary of defense.
In Iraq, the predictable result of the “finish ‘em off” approach was a proliferation of radical jihadists throughout the Middle East and Africa. Entire new Al Qaeda franchises, such as ISIS, emerged in response to American military intervention, because the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, and their sympathizers in other lands, were incensed not only by the invasions themselves but also the savage techniques of the occupiers—from rendering and torture to summary execution—with many obviously innocent people killed in the process because they happened to be located in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The Lethality First program to hunt down and “bring to justice” the perpetrators multiplied rather than diminished the number of persons willing to undertake radical jihad, including suicidal missions, to stop what they conceived of as the evil empire of the United States. As if to confirm the very belief on the part of what became violent dissidents, that the United States was a merciless and rapacious hegemon, those running the Global War on Terror forged ahead, killing more and more. This mistake, which had already been harrowingly witnessed in Vietnam, continues to be made because when lethality is regarded as an end in itself, there is nothing left to do but to kill, even when it means subjecting many times more innocent people to the injustice of having their lives stolen away. At some point, Lethal Firsters become altogether oblivious that what sparked the entire conflagration was in fact the slaughter of innocent people and the anger of their survivors, precisely what initiated the Global War on Terror.
The outcry against the Israeli government has been much louder than that against the U.S. government, in part because of the concentration of moral atrocities within the small area of land known as Gaza strip. The crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq were spread out over vast expanses of land and went on for years. In Israel, the killers have repeatedly and undeniably, without pause, targeted sites which housed primarily innocent persons, including Mosques, schools, hospitals, residential areas, and refugee camps. The claim always made by the killers is that Hamas is hiding within the structures being bombed. But the images of mangled corpses of children and hospital patients being burned alive has been too much for many people to accept. Consequently, nonviolent protest movements have emerged all over the world, in addition to indictments of the Israeli government at both the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), in heartfelt attempts to stop the killers who have made it clear that they intend to eradicate Hamas no matter how many innocent people will need to be sacrificed in the process.
Notwithstanding Blinken’s moment of clarity regarding Israel’s counterproductive assault on the Palestinian people, the focus on lethality as the summum bonum of foreign policy in fact led the Biden administration’s state department to prioritize not diplomacy but the provision of weapons to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even after having already seen that he would not hesitate to use them to kill thousands of innocent people, in venues traditionally regarded as off-limits for bombing. Rather than insisting on a diplomatic resolution to the crisis, the Biden administration drafted a peace plan back in May 2024 only to undermine it by continuing to ship weapons to the Israeli government to do with as it pleased.
During Blinken’s final press conference, two journalists, Max Blumenthal of The Grey Zone and Sam Husseini, refused to let the pseudo-diplomat off the hook for his failure to cease aiding and abetting the mass slaughter. Before being dragged out the door of the press conference by armed guards, Blumenthal cried out:
“Three hundred reporters in Gaza were on the receiving end of your bombs. Why did you keep the bombs flowing when we had a deal in May? We all knew we had a deal. Everyone in this room knows we had a deal, Tony, and you kept the bombs flowing…Why did you allow my friends to be massacred?”
As he was dragged out, Husseini exclaimed, “Why aren’t you at the Hague? Why aren’t you at the Hague?”
It is difficult to understand how ostensibly rational and intelligent policymakers can altogether neglect the entirely predictable consequences of their own commission or facilitation of mass slaughter. But they do, at least until they retire, at which point some of them occasionally express reservations about Lethality First. In The Spymasters: CIA in the Crosshairs (2015), an engaging Showtime documentary in the spirit of Errol Morris’ The Fog of War (2003) and Dror Moreh’s The Gatekeepers (2012), directors Jules Naudet and Gedeot Naudet use the same technique of interviewing former government officials to determine what they take themselves to have been doing as they participated in or directed what came to be highly controversial tactics rationalized in the name of national defense since September 11, 2001.
The Spymasters features former directors and officials of the CIA who share their perspectives on “enhanced interrogation techniques” and “targeted killing” carried out during the Global War on Terror. The film ends with a striking sequence of former CIA directors articulating essentially the same important truth recently reiterated by Secretary Blinken: “You can’t kill your way out of this.” Unfortunately, the only people deemed qualified to run the Department of Defense are blinded by their obsession with lethality, virtually guaranteeing that the same mistakes will be made over and over again. Given his publicly expressed views, Secretary Hegsweth can be expected to generate more enemies than his forces eliminate. The new franchises and recruits will become the pretext for yet more killing and, obviously, further increases in the already astronomical defense budget. Lather, rinse, repeat. All of this bodes very well for the defense industry, but ominously for humanity, as entire lifetimes and infinite human value continue to be erased under the nihilistic pseudo-pretext that nothing matters more than the evil enemy.
In addition to being a counterproductive waste of blood and treasure, this approach to foreign policy objectifies whoever the latest enemy du jour is said to be, even when that enemy was created by previous policies, as in the case of the empowerment of both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Yesterday’s ally can become tomorrow’s enemy because human beings have the potential to change their views right up until the moment they die, which also implies that today’s enemy could be brought around to become an ally. When, instead, thousands upon thousands of persons in the prime of their lives are slaughtered, the intrinsic value of those centers of consciousness and loci of rationality are brushed aside under the simpleminded assumption that, in the name of combating evil, gross injustice may be exacted against people who had no hand in or means to stop the crimes being avenged.
The “collateral damage victims” treated in this way are also objectified, regarded as mere statistics, not persons with histories and relationships and future plans and projects, all of which are forever lost when they are obliterated by missiles. It is astounding that so much carnage has been rationalized in the name of democracy, peace, and justice. War is the antithesis of peace, and nothing could be less democratic than state-perpetrated mass homicide, which vests the power to kill in a small group of political elites and disregards the opinions of the people on the ground.
A conflict is not “resolved” by annihilating the compatriots of bad actors, rather than attempting to understand that community’s perspective and coming to a reasoned agreement about how to achieve a peaceful cohabitation of the planet. Through highly lethal bombing campaigns, some of the wrongdoers may be punished, but so will be anyone who happens to live nearby and, eventually, the future people who will bear the brunt of blowback and quests for revenge such as happened on both September 11, 2001 and on October 7, 2023. Increasing lethality is bound to increase the amount of indiscriminate homicide committed, which radicalizes previously neutral persons, motivating them to seek retaliatory revenge. The fact that this lesson has yet to be learned by Secretary of Defense Hegsweth is concerning, to say the least.
