Department of Violence

United States Secretary of “War”¹ Pete Hegseth has been a regular fixture in the news since his appointment in January 2025. But he has recently raised more eyebrows than usual with the one-two combination of his September speech to a large proportion of senior U.S. military commanders, staged at enormous expense and inconvenience, followed by his celebrations of “smoking” supposed drug runners, without any plausible legal justification. Together, the speech and the attacks reveal an American policy of war without rules, violence without constraint. In my 2016 book, On War and Democracy, I warned about the ways that democratic, outcome-driven politics could undermine the fragile norms that render war slightly less horrible by allowing states to treat their democratic bona fides as sufficient justification for whatever action they take. I confess that, even after the Bush-era War on Terror, I failed to foresee that a later U.S. presidential administration might not even pretend to legally justify its use of deadly force. We have traded cynicism for nihilism.

This was missed in much of the initial news coverage of the speech. Instead, the Secretary’s speech mainly attracted comment for the incongruity of a former TV news anchor, whose own military career never took him beyond command of a platoon, lecturing his “fat” generals and admirals on their failure to attend to fitness and grooming standards. “It’s a bad look,” he said; and the same was said of him.²

Other parts of Hegseth’s speech would have been standard fare taken on their own: a rhetoric of “lethality” and an ode to men who “kill people and break things for a living,” who are not necessarily fit “for polite society.” Hegseth perhaps thought he was épater-ing the “libs” and “woke” generals, insisting that they face up to the core, violent mission of the military. In fact, every recent defense secretary, from Ash Carter³ (Obama) to James Mattis⁴ (Trump I) to Lloyd Austin⁵ (Biden) has sung the virtues of lethality.

But that sameness masks a difference. These other defense secretaries immediately shifted from their validation of hard military power to an insistence that it be coupled with the soft power of alliances, because, as Mattis said, “anyone who reads history knows that nations with allies thrive and nations without allies basically wither away.”⁶ Or as Austin stated: “we know that our unmatched network of alliances and partnerships is one of America's great strategic advantages.”⁷

What distinguished Hegseth’s speech was his repudiation of the soft power of ideals and alliances. He invoked the idea of allies only once, to extol President Trump’s success in getting NATO allies to raise their expenditures on defense.⁸ Hegseth’s departure from the standard script, in favor of a go-it-alone message of strength through unilaterally-imposed fear rather than multilateral alliances, is notable not just for its strategic blindness to the systems that created the American hegemony he celebrates but for his failure to acknowledge any deeper ordering principle to military power than lethality alone.

Alliances can be transactional, to be sure, trading protection for access. But the deepest and most enriching alliances of the post-war period have been built on the set of common principles referred to as the “rules-based international order.” I do not want to pretend that that order treats all nations fairly, or that it does not advantage the strong over the weak. But it does demand a level of justification for unilateral action in a common vocabulary. Without such justification, there can be no enduring alliances and no global strength. Instead of serving as an enforcement mechanism for the international system, we will have, according to Hegseth, “a military that will win any war we choose or any war that is thrust upon us” (my italics). Wars of choice, it might be recalled, have (at least in principle) been outlawed since the signing of the UN Charter in June 1945.

Fighting without Rules

It is disturbing enough that Hegseth claims that the United States has the authority to go to war if it so chooses. And yet the most troubling part of Hegseth’s speech is that he goes on to announce that these wars will be henceforth won because the United States can fight with its gloves off. That is, Hegseth rejects the very idea of a law of armed conflict:

"We fight to win. We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We [] don't fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters."

These are perhaps unsurprising words from the author of The War on Warriors, someone who came into the public eye for his campaign to get President Trump to pardon war criminals. But they reflect a profound moral and strategic mistake. War with rules is still hell, but it has boundaries, thresholds, and limits. Without law, it is terroristic chaos.

Rules matter at the individual, organizational, national, and international levels. The part of the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) known as jus in bello governs how and against whom force may intentionally be used: only against combatants, not civilians or those hors de combat; only with weapons and tactics that do not cause unnecessary suffering; always ensuring that likely (but unintended) harm to civilians stays proportionate to military objectives; and with an effective system of responsibility for ensuring these rules are followed. The Rules of Engagement (ROE) Hegseth disparages do two things: they distill these basic principles of LOAC into principles for frontline troops to follow, and they also incorporate specific, contextual political needs—for example, raising thresholds for legally permissible harm to civilians in order to protect fragile alliances or (as at times in the Obama administration) restricting air strikes to cases where there will be no foreseeable civilian casualties, regardless of military necessity.

It is true that these rules, even when scrupulously followed, permit a great deal of violence, pain, and destruction, of both targeted and collateral people and objects. And it is also true that in the asymmetric conflicts that have most recently engaged U.S. forces, adversarial forces have mostly ignored these rules, leading to frustration and difficult choices by the soldiers who do. But together these rules constitute a moral spine for both the soldiers and the organizations that employ them, distinguishing legitimate combatants from vandals, brigands, and terrorists, and enabling the former to understand their actions in terms of the values that justify them.

Soldiers are trying to satisfy three different kinds of values: pragmatic or utilitarian—the good arising from achieving the mission; virtue—their sense of honor and worth in accomplishing the mission in accordance with their self-understanding; and the principles of right and wrong that constrain their mission. But these three kinds of values are linked. First, since the medieval chivalric codes, a warrior’s honor has consisted not only of ferocity in battle but also of an attention to principles of restraint—principles that for nearly two hundred years have placed care of civilians at their core.⁹ Second, the pragmatic goals themselves need underlying principles for their justification: soldiers need a narrative of why the ordinarily forbidden acts of violence they undertake are worth doing. That narrative of worthiness depends on principles like self-defense or defense of allies; otherwise, committing violence is a matter of just following orders blindly.

Murder on the High Seas

As I mentioned above, Hegseth’s speech took place in the context of a series of international outrages. For weeks prior and now for many weeks since, the United States Navy has been carrying out lethal strikes on boats in the Caribbean (and some in the Pacific), claiming without evidence that the boats were running drugs to the U.S. mainland. Hegseth has taken to celebrating these attacks in streamed videos. As of this writing, at least fourteen boats have been destroyed and sixty people killed. Public statements justifying the strikes have been limited and nonsensical, mainly referring to preventing fentanyl deaths in the United States, even though the small boats that have been targeted could not plausibly have reached the mainland, and fentanyl comes via Mexico, not Venezuela or Colombia, much less by sea. But even if we grant the factual assertions, the illegality of these attacks is beyond dispute.¹⁰ Under LOAC, the jus ad bellum part, lethal force may only be used in the context of armed hostilities. Drug smuggling is categorically not a form of armed hostility that can justify a state’s use of defensive force. Drug runners are not combatants. Ergo, lethal force used to destroy them is homicide under the military code and international law. Until September 2025, the U.S. Coast Guard interdicted such boats rather than just blowing them up. This was not a policy choice. It is a fundamental demand of law.

Given the number of lawyers, civilian and military, employed by Hegseth’s department and the U.S. Department of Justice, one might wonder whether the illegality can be as clear as I assert. But in fact the Trump Administration has made no positive legal argument whatsoever to justify the strikes.¹¹ Instead, the Trump administration appears to be relying on its own version of the Führerprinzip, Executive Order 14215 (Feb. 18, 2025), which declares that “the President’s opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties.”¹² This means that, as a matter of policy, no lawyer within the executive branch can offer a contrary interpretation of international and domestic law, no matter how absurd the president’s interpretation. (Hegseth’s first act of firing the senior military lawyers did nothing to encourage independent thought.¹³). Of course, the president’s interpretation does not change the actual law, and so personnel committing murder under presidential orders are potentially criminally liable (even if the Supreme Court has immunized the president himself). But because prosecution is also an executive function, the Executive Order effectively creates a law-free zone around the president’s military commands, at least while President Trump is in office and assuming he does not offer pre-emptive pardons.¹⁴

The Moral Costs of Violence

But the potential legal liability of soldiers is only part of the story. Moral liability cannot be pardoned by a lawless president.¹⁵ Scholars, as well as military chaplains and psychologists, have a term for what happens to soldiers when they act, or are required to act, in ways that do not mesh with honor or principle: “moral injury.”¹⁶ As a psychological matter, moral injury is akin to PTSD, with debilitating physical and mental effects. Unlike PTSD, however, it is not simply caused by exposure to a frightening or violent situation. It arises, rather, because a soldier cannot make sense of what they have done in ethical terms. This means that moral injury is as pernicious on a spiritual level, because it means that soldiers who seek to take responsibility for some of the most consequential acts in their lives cannot do so—they cannot make sense of themselves in their roles and in their lives. Denying soldiers the benefits of LOAC and deriding the Rules of Engagement as “legal bullshit” means denying them the possibility of understanding when the violence they do is justified. And this means denying them the chance to garb themselves in the dignity of ethical warriors.

I worry for the soldiers, but I worry as well for the United States, that we will collectively suffer from moral injury. Any nation that decides to ignore the rule of law in its deployment of violence risks becoming an international pariah, as well as losing its own internal sense of limitation. Witness Israel in the wake of more than 65,000 dead Gazans, the majority non-combatants. Some of us are old enough to remember the common practice of U.S. travelers adorning their backpacks with maple leaves to avoid hostility when abroad. Military and governmental personnel caught up in these attacks may find themselves liable to arrest abroad under principles of global jurisdiction, like the Bush torture enablers. There have been reports that the UK has suspended intelligence sharing with the United States about the Caribbean, where its commonwealth stations are otherwise well-placed, to avoid complicity. But the worst consequences are faced by the world. Vice President JD Vance’s statement when asked whether he was concerned about the illegality of these actions, that he “[doesn’t] give a shit,” foretells the emergence of a fully rogue superpower, guided by impulsivity, self-importance, and performative bluster.¹⁷

Maybe my claims seem exaggerated. Countries are not people, and the U.S. has a long history of conflicts on or well over the chalk line of legality and morality. But we should be wary of ignoring La Rochefoucauld’s aphorism that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.¹⁸ The constitutive feature of a liberal democracy is not that it has a commander-in-chief elected by a plurality of voters and officials to enact his ephemeral will. Liberal democracies have purpose and integrity because they hold themselves to standards of public justification, both internally and abroad. Even when the arguments are forced or unconvincing, as with the Second Gulf War, they are an effort to connect future actions with past principles, and to lay out a basis for argument and disagreement. Moreover, as I noted when writing in Ethics & International Affairs¹⁹ about the post-9/11 descent into the ethical swamp of torture and assassination, I held out hope that military lawyers could be a counterforce to jingoistic civilian leaders arguing that the electoral legitimacy of the president was sufficient to justify any act, domestic and international law be damned. Those were the good old days. Any fool can strap on a weapon, and any murderer can kill. Genuine warriors, and decent states, must try to do so with honor and principle. Hegseth seems intent on destroying both.

—Christopher Kutz

Christopher Kutz is C. William Maxeiner Professor of Law and, by courtesy, Philosophy and Political Science at UC Berkeley. He is the author of On War and Democracy (Princeton, 2016) and, most recently, Publics in Action (Oxford 2025).

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