Pete Hegseth’s ‘No Quarter’ War-Crime Directive

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Friday, from a Pentagon podium, in an official government briefing, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said this: “We will keep pressing. We will keep pushing, keep advancing, no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.” 

The line appears in the official Pentagon transcript, was quoted by Reuters, and was also reported by The New York Times.

That is not just thuggish rhetoric. It is not just chest-thumping. It is not just one more example of the coarsened language of Trump-era politics bleeding into national security.

“No quarter” has a specific meaning in the law of war. It means refusing to spare the lives of enemy fighters even if they are wounded, helpless, or trying to surrender. 

It is illegal to give such an order and Hegseth knows it.

You do not need the Red Cross to tell you it’s illegal although they will. It’s called Rule 46. 

Rule 46 says that ordering that no quarter will be given, threatening an adversary with it, or conducting hostilities on that basis is prohibited. The Pentagon’s own law-of-war system says the US military must comply with the law of war, and under that body of law a “no quarter” order is unlawful.

So let’s be clear about what happened here. The American defense secretary did not merely sound bloodthirsty. He used language that civilized militaries do not use. They do not use it because it is illegal, and civilized militaries (not an oxymoron, by the way) are supposed to think that way.

And here is what makes it worse: He cannot plausibly hide behind ignorance. This exact issue was already litigated, publicly and extensively, just a few months ago. 

In the fallout from the September 2 double-tap boat strike, The Washington Post reported that Hegseth had issued a verbal order to kill everyone aboard a suspected drug boat, and legal experts quoted in that reporting said such an order would in essence amount to a “no quarter” order.

In other words, this was not some phrase he stumbled into innocently. The meaning of “no quarter” was already on the record. It had already been debated in public. He knows all about it because he’s been tagged with it before. It had already been attached to his name, his conduct, and the legality of lethal action taken under his authority. He already knew — or had every reason to know — exactly how explosive those words were.

And yet he said them anyway.

That is the real scandal.

Not that Hegseth is crude, or stupid, or ignorant, though he is all of that. Nor is it that he is reckless. We already knew that too. The scandal is that the secretary of defense of the United States stood at the Pentagon and casually invoked the language of unlawful warfare, after previously being dragged through a national controversy over the very same concept, and did so as though it were merely a tougher, manlier way of saying “we mean business.”

I’m sorry. We have normalized many things in this country, tragically so. But this is beyond the pale for the military leader of any country. It is especially beyond the pale for America. 

It takes a lot these days to generate outrage but this should — this must — generate outrage.

Will it?

Hell if I know.

The United States has spent generations telling itself — and telling the world — that what distinguishes us from barbarism is not that we avoid force, but that we discipline it. That what makes our military honorable is not that it is gentle, but that it is governed. That even in war there are lines, and that America, however imperfectly, is supposed to recognize them.

“No quarter” is the language of a man who does not believe in those lines.

Or worse, who believes they are for suckers.

That possibility is not hypothetical. The Times notes that in his 2024 book Hegseth suggested US compliance with the Geneva Conventions had contributed to battlefield struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Times also reported that his “no quarter” remark drew criticism from international law experts, and quoted Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), an Iraq War veteran, saying Hegseth has “a very clear disdain” for the law of war and basic humanity.

So my take on this — it wasn’t a slip. It was a reveal.

Maybe what we saw Friday was not a momentary lapse of diction, but the open expression of a worldview: that restraint is weakness, law is for fools, and America wins by threatening to become what it once claimed to oppose.

If so, then the problem is larger than one phrase. The problem is that the United States is now represented — and in critical ways commanded — by a man who talks like a war criminal even when standing behind an official lectern.

Some will try to wave this away. They will say he was speaking colloquially. They will say everyone knows he did not literally mean that surrendering troops should be killed. They will say critics are being precious, legalistic, or anti-military.

No. That defense is too easy, and in this case it is dishonest.

Words matter, especially from people who command organized violence. Military language matters. Legal language matters. The language used by a defense secretary at a televised wartime briefing matters most of all.

 If the secretary cannot distinguish between macho bluster and terminology that the laws of war specifically forbid, then he is unfit for the office he holds. And if he can distinguish it, and used it anyway, that is worse.

There is no good version of this story.

Either Pete Hegseth did not know what “no quarter” means, in which case he is dangerously ignorant and should not be running the Pentagon.

Or he did know what it means, in which case the American people just watched their defense secretary publicly threaten a form of warfare that the civilized world long ago placed outside the bounds of lawful conduct.

Choose whichever explanation you like. Neither is acceptable.

This should not be normalized. It should not be spun. It should not be buried under the day’s other headlines. It should be treated as what it is: a disqualifying statement by a disqualified man.

Once, Hegseth and his defenders had room to wriggle. There were leaks, denials, competing accounts, fog, ambiguity. Today there was none. He said it himself. On camera. At the Pentagon. In the government’s own transcript.

America is not supposed to be represented this way.

And any country that keeps men like this in command long enough eventually learns the same lesson: When leaders start talking as though law is optional, they rarely stop at talk.

End of rant. But I’m not apologizing for this one. Too many Americans have served honorably for too long to be represented by this fool.

As a service to our readers, we curate exceptional stories through partnerships with outside writers and thinkers. Michael D. Sellers is a former CIA officer currently working as a criminal defense and civil rights investigator. This column has been adapted with the author’s permission from his substack Deeper Look with Michael Sellers.