In February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force in a bid to ensure “they don’t exist to be roadblocks to anything that happens.” Rosa Brooks, a professor at Georgetown Law, wrote on X at the time: “It’s what you do when you’re planning to break the law: you get rid of any lawyers who might try to slow you down.”
Now the Guardian, citing “two people familiar with the matter,” reports Hegseth is planning a “sweeping overhaul of the judge advocate general’s corps as part of an effort to make the US military less restricted by the laws of armed conflict.” (The report has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News.) The Guardian also says that, according to the same sources, the overhaul of the JAG corps is designed to retrain military lawyers “so that they provide more expansive legal advice to commanders to pursue more aggressive tactics and take a more lenient approach in charging soldiers with battlefield crimes.”
Considering the U.S. military’s long track record of documented human rights abuses and disregarding civilian life, Hegseth’s maneuvering looks like he wants to make the military more vicious and callous than it already is. And while the U.S. military is far from the only one in the world that shows negligence toward civilian life in combat zones, its conduct is the most highly scrutinized and influential in the world given its unrivaled reach, power and interventionism since World War II.
Atop all this, Hegseth is also cutting jobs and offices focused on reducing civilian deaths from U.S. combat operations. Though the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Office and the Civilian Protection Center were set up during Trump’s first term, in his second term these offices are being framed as an obstacle to the U.S.’ ability to wage war. But retired U.S. Army Gen. Joseph Votel told NPR last week that he believed that it would be harmful to the military’s functioning to remove them. “I don’t think this is designed to be more constricting on commanders. I think it’s really designed to be more informative in helping us be a better educated and smarter force.”
These changes are all consistent with what we know about Hegseth’s draconian and primitive attitudes toward combat. The former Fox News host — who has been dogged by allegations of sexual assault, excessive drinking and mismanagement in his previous jobs — is obsessed with the narrative that the U.S. military has gone soft and needs to be reignited with a “warrior ethos.” In particular, Hegseth insists that the military is held back by “wokeness.”
In his book “The War on Warriors,” Hegseth wrote of his experience as a soldier with the Army National Guard during the George W. Bush administration, “In some cases, our units were so boxed in by rules and regulations and political correctness, we even second-guess ourselves. That needs to end.”
Keep in mind that Hegseth was deployed in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. In both conflicts, the U.S. carried out morally and strategically catastrophic wars that resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths — often due to overly permissive rules of engagement — and torture of locals. The problem wasn’t too many rules, it was too few of them.
In a breach of norms, Hegseth has appointed his personal lawyer and former naval officer, Timothy Parlatore, as a Navy commander in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Jason Dempse, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a former U.S. Army officer, wrote in The Atlantic that Parlatore’s appointment reflected “an odious philosophy of warfare”:
Like his new boss at the Pentagon, Parlatore has a pattern of providing support to soldiers accused of grave misconduct, even war crimes. He notably represented Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL court-martialed on charges including the murder of a captured fighter (though he was found guilty only of one, lesser charge), along with a second SEAL accused of serious sexual offenses. Elevating a lawyer with this record does not bode well for the armed services Hegseth hopes to build.
Moreover, as my colleague Steve Benen recently reminded us: Parlatore “had another very high-profile client: Parlatore was part of Donald Trump’s legal defense team after the president was charged with multiple felonies in the classified documents/Mar-a-Lago scandal.” It’s safe to predict that Parlatore isn’t going to be elevating the already-beleaguered moral stature of the U.S. military.
Hegseth’s vision for American defense policy is consistent with Trumpism more broadly — an appetite for strong man rule and a disregard for rule of law and decency. It certainly doesn’t bode well for Trump’s increasingly preposterous claims that he wants to be a president “of peace.”
