Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth giving American military illegal orders in violation of the Defense Department's policy to save shipwrecked survivors

Echo opinion published in the Virginian Pilot, newpaper in Norfolk Virginia written by Jon Duffy*.

Pege Hegseth is giving illegal orders to American military in violaion of the Pentagon's own policies. 

New reporting from the Washington Post described how the U.S. forces conducting counter-drug operations in the Caribbean fired second missiles at people who survived an initial strike and were left swimming in the water. 

This illegal war crime marks a stark departure from long-standing U.S. military practice and from the most basic prohibitions in the laws of war.

If the United States is firing second missiles at survivors of its own strikes, we are no longer debating policy. 

Rather, we are describing a nation committing the very acts it once prosecuted others for. We have become what we once condemned.

There is a rule every professional military knows it cannot break: You do not kill people who can no longer fight. You don’t do it because the moment you do, you are no longer engaged in war. You are no longer fighting an enemy. You are killing for the state.

For weeks, the country has argued over legal memos, theories of presidential authority and the semantics of “armed conflict.” All of that obscures a simpler truth. Killing survivors is not a legal gray area, a battlefield innovation or a partisan dispute. It is a war crime. Full stop❗

The Geneva Conventions forbids violence against anyone “placed hors de combat,” or “out of the fight.” 

As a matter of fact, the Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual restates this without qualification. Section 18.3.2.1 even states, “For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.” Every American service member learns it before deploying. Killing people who are swimming for their lives is not a “disputed framework.” It is the abandonment of law.

In three decades of service, I watched how the institution quietly conditions people for moments like this — not through malice, but through the steady rewarding of compliance and the quiet sidelining of candor. By the time a real moral test arrives, most of the system has already learned that silence is the safest choice.

We know that a senior lawyer at U.S. Southern Command raised legal concerns and was sidelined from the process. 

Silencing a dissenting voice is not the act of a confident military. We know the SOUTHCOM commander, Admiral Alvin Holsey, abruptly announced his retirement amid these operations. The effect was unmistakable: The last check on illegality disappeared, and the killing continued.

A second missile does not fire itself. Killing survivors requires the participation or assent of entire layers of command: intelligence analysts, targeteers, pilots, strike cell leads, watch officers, military lawyers, commanders, post-strike assessors. This was not a lone aviator making a catastrophic judgment. This was institutional, and the institution committed a crime.

The cost of this atrocity is suffered by those least empowered to stop it. Young Americans — some barely old enough to drink — will carry this for the rest of their lives. 

Unfortunately, some will rationalize it. Some will break under it. 

A nation that orders its warriors to kill the helpless forfeits the moral standing to ask anything further of them.

Firing on the defenseless is not a gray area or “irregular warfare.” Our uniforms may be cleaner, the legal memos more elaborate, the language more sanitized — but the act is the same. These are war crimes — ordered from the very top of the chain of command. And the consequence is unmistakable: the collapse of the moral credibility of American power.

There must be investigations. There must be consequences — reaching as far up the chain of command as the facts demand. A military that kills the helpless is not operating in a fog of war. It has crossed the final boundary separating a professional force from a system designed to execute, not to think.

A nation that orders its service members to kill the defenseless is not being protected by its military. It is morally injuring its warriors, dishonoring the institution they serve and disfiguring itself.

And a nation that tolerates this — without outrage, without accountability, without demanding that it stop immediately — can make no claim to exceptionalism. It has surrendered its soul.

*Jon Duffy is a retired Navy captain. His active duty career included command at sea and national security roles. He writes about leadership and democracy for the Los Angeles Times.