John,
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has made one thing unmistakably clear since the moment he took charge: he wants a military that pulls back from judgment, restraint, and established law.
When he assembled hundreds of senior officers at Quantico in September and told them, “You kill people and break things for a living,” he wasn’t just giving a speech — he was setting expectations. His pledge to eliminate “politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement” in favor of “maximum lethality” sent a dangerous signal throughout the chain of command.
So when Admiral Frank Bradley ordered a second strike on September 2 — a strike that killed two shipwrecked survivors in the Caribbean — he was operating within the climate Hegseth created. Even if Hegseth did not explicitly order that second strike, he cultivated an environment in which military leaders were led to believe that escalating force was not only acceptable but encouraged.
The ongoing bombing campaign, carried out under Hegseth’s dangerous ethos, has already taken at least 83 lives.
And here’s the reality: if President Trump’s claim that we are “at war” is the justification for these bombings, then targeting shipwrecked survivors is a war crime. Under the International Law of Armed Conflict, survivors in the water are “protected persons” who must be rescued — never attacked. If we are not at war, then these killings have no legal justification whatsoever.
Send a message to your Senators and Representative demanding Congress act immediately to impeach Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
This is not a gray area. The Uniform Code of Military Justice explicitly names the killing of shipwrecked survivors as an illegal order that service members have a duty to refuse. Attacking people in the water violates more than a century of settled international law, including the 1949 Geneva Convention and the 1907 Hague Convention, and it runs counter to the core values the United States claims to uphold.
As the scale and illegality of these strikes come into focus, congressional leaders from both parties are starting to demand answers. Senators Roger Wicker and Jack Reed, the chair and ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, are already pressing for accountability.
And the firsthand accounts from lawmakers who have seen the classified footage are damning. Rep. Jim Himes, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, said:
“What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service. You have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, [who] were killed by the United States… Any American who sees the video that I saw will see the United States military attacking shipwrecked sailors.”
Subpoenas and investigation are necessary. But getting half-baked excuses from Trump’s military leaders is not enough. Impeachment is the constitutional remedy to hold accountable an incompetent and out-of-control official whose leadership results in unauthorized, deadly actions against unidentified civilians.
But for Congress to act with the urgency this moment demands, lawmakers need to hear from us. They need to know that the American people consider Pete Hegseth utterly unfit to serve as Secretary of Defense. Tell Congress today: Impeach Pete Hegseth.
Thank you for making your voice heard at this critical moment.
Robert Reich
Inequality Media Civic Action
