U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attends a press conference in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 6, 2026.
Since his appointment as Secretary of Defense at the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth has posed himself as a relentless advocate of what he calls “warrior ethos,” in which the “woke” military has no place and “maximum lethality” will prevail. But according to over a dozen Pentagon officials who spoke with Rolling Stone, Hegseth’s penchant for violence is not only a “weird obsession,” but could lead the United States into another military quagmire.
Among Hegseth’s core beliefs is the assertion that the rules of engagement by which American soldiers conduct themselves hinders their effectiveness.
“If we’re going to send our boys to fight — and it should be boys — we need to unleash them to win,” Hegseth wrote his book The War on Warriors. “They need them to be the most ruthless. The most uncompromising. The most overwhelmingly lethal as they can be.”
But according to a retired Marine officer who served in Afghanistan, the main problems underlying the conflict — in which Hegseth also served — had more to do with its fundamental premise than anything else, saying, “Rules of engagement is way down the list of reasons that we were operationally hampered.”
“He gets up at his press conferences and talks about how great it is that we’re just slaughtering these Iranians,” says Mike Nelson, a retired Army Special Forces officer and a member of the Atlantic Council’s Counterterrorism Project. “That’s a necessary end to achieve goals through military force — you have to kill people to achieve them. That’s not the end. It’s a weird obsession with death for the sake of it.”
Said James R. Webb, a Marine Iraq combat veteran, “One of the things you learn when you’re in that environment is that violence and war sucks. It is not to be celebrated. It is something that is strictly necessary when all other options are off the table.”
Hegseth’s mindset, says these and other veterans, is exactly what drags the U.S. into endless warfare: the idea that violence is the first and best solution.
“Hear it from me, one of hundreds of thousands who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, who watched previous foolish politicians like Bush, Obama, and Biden squander American credibility — this is not those wars,” Hegseth promised in the early days of fighting. “Epic Fury is different.”
Since making that statement, the war with Iran has pushed alliances to the breaking point and spiraled into a global economic disaster while inflicting death and devastation across Iran and the Persian Gulf. While a tenuous ceasefire is holding for the moment, the Pentagon has troops preparing for a ground assault, Trump is posting about the “next conquest,” and the justifications for war in Iran remain unclear.
At this point, the primary goal being presented is to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which was only closed because the U.S. launched the war in the first place. Now, “it seems the U.S. military is mired in a conflict to solve a problem it caused with no clear exit strategy.”
According to Rolling Stone, “Hegseth seems doomed to repeat the same errors as his predecessors — sending America’s men and women into harm’s way without a clear objective” beyond inflicting violence for the sake of violence.