Washington Examiner defense reporter Mike Brest said Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has long supported people in “active duty” making military operation decisions, as illustrated by the first strike against an alleged Venezuelan drug smuggling vessel.
Hegseth has come under fire after he authorized Adm. Frank Mitchell Bradley to conduct the Sept. 2 strike against a Venezuelan ship in the Caribbean, which was allegedly carrying drugs. Bradley ordered a follow-up strike on the destroyed vessel that U.S. forces had already targeted after it became clear that two survivors were clinging to the ship’s wreckage.
“The secretary was very clear in saying that he supported the admiral’s decision to carry out the follow-up strike, but he was not in the room and did not know about it before it occurred,” Brest said on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal on Wednesday.
Brest went on to cite Hegseth’s book, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, which was released in 2024 before he was nominated to be war secretary.
“When you look back at the book he wrote, a theme of that and what he’s carried over into his term as secretary of war is that people in Washington, in his opinion, should not be dictating the way active duty service members carry out their operations,” Brest said. “He doesn’t believe that politicians who are not in jeopardy, on the front lines, should necessarily be policing the way service members are carrying out life and death situations.”
HEGSETH DIDN’T ‘STICK AROUND’ TO SEE BRADLEY CARRY OUT SECOND BOAT STRIKE ON SURVIVORS
Hegseth defended Bradley’s decision again on Tuesday during a Trump administration Cabinet meeting.
Following the Cabinet meeting, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) accused Hegseth of either lying or being “incompetent” about the operation. He suggested that Hegseth was acting like “political figures pointing their fingers at military figures” due to reporting that Bradley ultimately decided to strike a second time.
