STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has a long record of questioning the military's rules of engagement. He used to talk about it as a weekend host on Fox News. In 2019, President Trump reportedly considered pardoning American service members under investigation for or convicted of war crimes, and Hegseth said this.
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PETE HEGSETH: You train someone to go fight and kill the enemy. Then they go kill the enemy the way someone doesn't like, and then we put them in jail or we throw the book at them.
INSKEEP: Hegseth wrote his own book, which included a chapter titled "More Lethality, Less Lawyers." In that book, he tells a story of being a junior officer in Iraq and telling his platoon to ignore the advice of a military lawyer about when they can open fire on a perceived threat. After he became defense secretary this year, Hegseth summoned military leaders to a meeting at Quantico, Virginia.
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HEGSETH: We fight to win. We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We also don't fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our war fighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country.
INSKEEP: Let's discuss this further with retired Major General Steven Lepper. He ended his military career as the deputy judge advocate general of the Air Force. JAGs, as they're called, are military lawyers. And there is a profane term for JAGs, which Hegseth uses in his book. General Lepper is now with a group called National Security Leaders for America. Good morning, sir.
STEVEN LEPPER: Good morning.
INSKEEP: You're chuckling because you know that term. We can't say it here on the radio. We've heard what Hegseth has said about military law, but as defense secretary, what has he done about it?
LEPPER: Well, I think, you know, one of the reasons why this story has become such a topic of discussion among Americans is because it's awakened the American conscience. Americans cannot understand how the most respected military in the world got to this point. A point where our military, which has always been considered by Americans in the world as the good guys, became capable of crossing over a bright line into illegality and immorality by targeting a disabled vessel in which two survivors were clinging to life. And I think, as your setup indicated, that as Congress investigates this and as the facts come out, I think we'll find that the road that has taken us to this place didn't start with an illegal order from Hegseth or from Admiral Bradley.
INSKEEP: Where did it start?
LEPPER: It started when Hegseth fired the Army and Air Force judge advocate general and communicated to the military that the law and lawyers are roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief. And then he continued when he told the world that the Department of War would be focused on his, quote, "maximum lethality, not tepid legality."
INSKEEP: Is he right that the lawyers can sometimes be too restrictive?
LEPPER: No. In my 35 years of active military service, my role was to advise commanders on where the guardrails existed so that we did not veer off into an area of illegality and immorality that would ultimately embarrass our country. The law of war actually focuses the application of military power on the things that will provide military advantage. They don't undermine our ability to prosecute military operations.
INSKEEP: Well, I'm thinking about the story he tells in his book, and that's a story of his troops in perceived danger and restricted from, as they would see it, eliminating a threat. I guess we should ask, is that at all a factor in the Caribbean? Was anybody in danger in that situation in the Caribbean, so far as we know? Any American?
LEPPER: No. And as a matter of fact, one of the facts that lead many lawyers to conclude that this is not a legal operation in the first place is the fact that these are not armed vessels. They're, you know, presumably carrying drugs to our shores, and there's an attempt here to create an equivalency between drugs and arms. And so, you know, any notion that these vessels pose a risk to our forces because of the armed force that they carry is just ludicrous.
INSKEEP: I just want to ask about the differing accounts of what the bottom line is really, given the differing accounts. There are different details and different reports about exactly who ordered which strike, but it seems confirmed now there were multiple strikes. Some people survived the first strike and the U.S. military struck again. Granting that we may not know every single fact, are you prepared to make some kind of judgment as to whether those second strikes were legal?
LEPPER: Well, we do need to wait until all the facts come out, and we need to understand and remember that a bedrock principle of U.S. law is that everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty. But given the facts that I'm aware of, and even if you consider them in the best light possible for the forces on the ground who had to make that decision to conduct that second strike, this was a vessel that Secretary Hegseth as recently as yesterday said was on fire, and as such, was disabled at the very least, destroyed at the very worst. And the bottom line here is that even if it was only disabled, it was no longer navigable, which meant that the only way that the survivors on that vessel would survive is that if they were rescued. Once we have rendered a vessel capable of survival only if it's rescued, our obligation then shifts as well from attack to rescue. And so under those circumstances, even in the best light possible, I don't think that anyone can say that this was a lawful order.
INSKEEP: Retired Major General Steven Lepper. Thanks so much, sir.
LEPPER: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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