Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday continued what appears to be a deliberate effort to blame a veteran naval officer for the order to launch a second missile strike on an alleged drug-running boat that killed two survivors of an earlier missile hit.
Speaking at what the White House billed as the final Trump administration cabinet meeting of 2025 on Tuesday, the Pentagon boss closed out brief prepared remarks by stating that his department had “only just begun” striking what the administration has claimed, without offering evidence, are “narco-boats” and “putting narco-terrorists at the bottom of the ocean, because they've been poisoning the American people.”
He was referring to the series of attacks on small boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean by American forces that has killed at least 80 people since September 2, when the first such strike killed 11 people. That action has drawn renewed scrutiny since last week, when The Washington Post reported that American forces made a second strike on the vessel that killed two people who’d survived the initial hit by a U.S.-made missile.
Hegseth added: “We always have the back of our commanders who are making decisions in difficult situations, and we do in this case and all these strikes, they're making judgment calls and ensuring that they defend the American people. They've done the right things. We'll keep doing that, and we have their backs.”
During a subsequent question-and-answer session with reporters, Hegseth acknowledged that he had given the order for the first missile hit on the boat but claimed he’d already left the room when Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, the commanding officer who oversaw the mission carried out by the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, ordered a second missile fired on the wreckage.
“I watched that first strike live, as you can imagine, at the Department of War, we got a lot of things to do, so I didn't stick around ... a couple of hours later, I learned that that commander had made ... the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat,” Hegseth said.
He added that he “did not personally see survivors” after the first missile hit because “the thing was on fire and exploded.”
“This is called the fog of war,” he said.
Hegseth’s buck-passing to the decorated officer came one day after the White House attributed the decision to hit the survivors of the first missile hit to Bradley, with Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt telling reporters at a press briefing that Bradley had “worked well within his authority and the law, directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed” when ordering the follow-up attack.
The second missile strike, which left none of the vessel’s 11 passengers alive amid the wreckage, was carried out pursuant to what the Post called a verbal order from Hegseth to “kill everyone.”
It raised alarms among House and Senate armed services committee leaders, who suggested that the “double-tap” attack aimed at survivors of a wrecked vessel could have been illegal under American and international law because targeting shipwrecked people has long been considered a textbook example of a war crime.
But Leavitt claimed that no such laws had been violated and said Bradley’s orders were “well within his authority and the law.”
“He directed the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat from narco terrorists was eliminated,” she said.
Leavitt added that the strikes were “conducted in international waters and in accordance with the law of armed conflict.”
Her prepared statement left Pentagon officials who spoke to the Post incensed, with one calling the press secretary’s remarks “‘protect Pete’ bullshit.”
Another accused the White House spokesperson of “throwing us, the service members, under the bus” as Congress prepares to investigate the September 2 action.
Hegseth later took to social media to defend Bradley, a Naval Academy graduate who has spent much of his career within the secretive SEAL teams and was one of the first American service members to set foot in Afghanistan following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington.
Writing on X, he said he stood by Bradley “and the combat decisions he has made — on the September 2 mission and all others since” while calling the veteran officer “an American hero, a true professional.”
But Hegseth’s blame-shifting efforts may not satisfy congressional leaders who are intent on gathering more information about the attack.
Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker, the Republican chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters on Monday that he’d spoken with Hegseth, Joint Chiefs of Staff chair General Dan Caine, and would soon speak with Bradley as well.
“We’re going to find out what the true facts are,” Wicker said.
