Erika Santelices
Last week, the Washington Post reported that, in early September, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered the military to kill everyone on board a boat in the Caribbean suspected of carrying drugs. After an initial strike on the boat, two men were still alive; a second missile was launched to comply with Hegseth’s order. In the past three months, similar strikes on alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean and the Pacific have killed more than eighty people; the Post report was only the most disturbing example in a campaign that many legal experts and government officials believe to be unlawful. (On Sunday, President Trump said that Hegseth told him he had not given such an order.) This past weekend, the Republican heads of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees, in a rare break from Trump, joined the ranking Democrats on the committees in calling for further investigation of the September attack.
To talk about the Trump Administration’s strikes, I called Todd Huntley, the director of the National Security Law program at Georgetown University Law Center. Huntley previously served as a judge advocate in the Navy for more than two decades. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the apparent illegality of what has been reported about this attack, the similarities and differences between this strike and the worst parts of America’s drone wars, and, more broadly, what the Trump Administration wants to do to the culture of the U.S. military.
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