Every morning, Pete Hegseth puts on his dangerously tight suit — he is a civilian now, though he seems to keep forgetting — walks to the Pentagon briefing room, stands in front of a podium that has held people like Colin Powell, Robert Gates, and James Mattis, and tells America we are winning. Not just winning. Winning decisively. Yesterday was the biggest day of strikes. Today will be bigger. Tomorrow will be bigger than that. The enemy is crumbling. Iran's air force is gone. Its navy is gone. Its air defenses are flattened. Its industrial base is overwhelmingly destroyed. We are, every single day according to Pete Hegseth, at the apex of a glorious and relentless American victory.
There is just one problem. The data from Hegseth's own military doesn't support what Hegseth is saying. CNN obtained and analyzed the publicly released US Central Command strike numbers and found that while Hegseth has stood at that podium and declared each day the most intense day of bombing yet, the actual pace of operations has ebbed and flowed. On March 10, Hegseth said it was "yet again our most intense day of strikes inside Iran, the most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes." CENTCOM's own numbers show that between March 9 and March 12, the daily average was around 333 strikes — not a record, not an escalation, not the triumphant surge he described. On March 13 he said it was "yet again the highest volume of strikes that America has put over the skies of Iran." The average for the following four days was roughly 250 strikes per day. And on Thursday, three weeks into this war, he said "today will be the largest strike package yet, just like yesterday was." The data shows otherwise. He said it anyway.
This is not a small distinction. The Secretary of Defense is telling the American people, members of Congress, and the rest of the world that the war is escalating and intensifying every single day. His own military's numbers say that is not true. When CNN pressed for a response, the Defense Department referred them back to Hegseth's briefings. The briefings that contain the claims that contradict the data. That circle is not accidental.
Hegseth has declared that Iran has "no air defenses, no air force, no navy." Iran has continued to fire missiles at Israel, at US bases in the region, at Qatar's Ras Laffan gas terminal — the world's largest — and at a Saudi refinery on the Red Sea. The Strait of Hormuz, which Hegseth's boss said on March 4 would be under complete US and Israeli control within a week, remains effectively closed to commercial shipping. Brent crude is trading above $111 a barrel, up more than 60% since the war began. And on Thursday, a US F-35 fighter jet made an emergency landing after it was believed to have been struck by Iran during a combat mission — raising pointed questions about Hegseth's assertion, made on that same March 4 date, that complete control of Iranian airspace was imminent. The F-35 is the most advanced fighter jet in the world. Iran, according to Hegseth, has no air force.
Meanwhile, his own Director of National Intelligence told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the Iranian regime, despite the bombing, "appears to be intact." She said it was "largely degraded," but intact. Hegseth, that same week, called the Iranian military "confused, crumbling, barely able to communicate." One of these two people is describing reality. They serve the same president.
None of this would be merely embarrassing if the stakes were smaller. But Pete Hegseth is not a sports commentator overclaiming his team's momentum. He is the civilian head of the United States military, in charge of a war that has killed thirteen American soldiers and more than fourteen hundred Iranians in three weeks. His words have legal weight. His words set the tone for every commander, every targeter, every pilot in Operation Epic Fury. And the tone he has set, systematically and deliberately, is one that treats the laws of war as an obstacle to winning.
On March 2, his second briefing of the war, Hegseth announced that US forces would operate with "no stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars." He said warfighters had been given "maximum authorities granted personally by the president and yours truly." He renamed the Pentagon the Department of War. He has described the military's top lawyer corps — the Judge Advocate Generals, the JAGs, who exist to ensure military operations comply with US and international law — as "roadblocks" and "jagoffs," and fired the most senior of them within weeks of taking office. He has overseen, as ProPublica documented, the near-total dismantling of the Pentagon's Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response program — a congressionally mandated initiative designed to prevent the accidental killing of civilians — replacing its mandate with what he calls an emphasis on "maximum lethality, not tepid legality."
Then, on March 13, day fourteen of the war, Hegseth said this: "We will keep pressing. We will keep pushing, keep advancing. No quarter, no mercy for our enemies."
"No quarter" is not tough-guy rhetoric open to interpretation, though Hegseth's defenders have tried to claim it is. It is a specific, defined term in the law of armed conflict with a specific, defined meaning: take no prisoners. Kill combatants who attempt to surrender. Every military and legal framework the United States has ever operated under prohibits it. The Hague Convention of 1907, to which the United States is a party, explicitly forbids declaring that no quarter will be given. The Geneva Conventions prohibit it. The 1996 War Crimes Act — US domestic law — prohibits it. The Pentagon's own Law of War Manual, the book that governs how American forces fight, states unequivocally that such declarations are war crimes. The United States prosecuted senior Nazi military officials at Nuremberg for issuing exactly this kind of order. The prohibition on no quarter has been a cornerstone of the laws of war since the Lieber Code — the Union Army's rules of conduct during the Civil War.
Daniel Maurer, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and judge advocate who has taught at West Point and the Army's own law school, published a hypothetical legal memorandum addressed to Hegseth advising him to publicly retract the statement immediately. He was unambiguous about why: the declaration, regardless of whether Hegseth meant it literally or as bluster, exposed him to criminal liability under US federal law and exposed any service member who carried it out to prosecution under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Ryan Goodman, who served in the Defense Department's office of general counsel, called the statement a move toward "lawlessness in which we will lose more and more allies." Brian Finucane, a former State Department war crimes lawyer, said plainly: "Denial of quarter — even the declaration of no quarter — is a war crime. And recognized as such by the US Government."
Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a retired Navy captain who has spent more time in combat than Hegseth has spent studying the laws that govern it, said the no-quarter declaration "would mean to take no prisoners and kill them instead. That would be an illegal order. It would also put American service members at greater risk." That last part is the part Hegseth never addresses. When an enemy knows their surrender will not be accepted, they fight to the last. They have no other option. Hegseth's bravado doesn't only endanger Iranian combatants. It endangers the American soldiers he is supposed to be protecting.
Hegseth did not retract the statement. The Pentagon did not respond to requests for comment. Trump, asked about it, told NBC News that the US may hit Iran's Kharg Island "a few more times just for fun." Senator Kelly called the no-quarter comment and the just-for-fun comment together "proof there was never a clear strategy."
The consequences of Hegseth's doctrine — not the rhetoric, the actual operational doctrine of maximum lethality and no stupid rules — were made visible on February 28, the opening hours of the war. A Tomahawk missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, in Iran's southern Hormozgan province. At the time of the strike, the school was holding its morning session. More than 170 people were killed. The majority of them were girls between the ages of seven and twelve.
A preliminary US military investigation found the strike was likely American — caused by a targeting error using outdated coordinates that still showed the school as part of an adjacent Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval base. The school had been physically separated from that base sometime between 2013 and 2016. The satellite imagery that would have shown this was available. The Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response teams — whose job was to review exactly this kind of targeting data, cross-check coordinates, assess civilian risk, and maintain current no-strike lists — had been cut by 90 percent under Hegseth. US Central Command, responsible for the entire Middle East theater, had exactly one staffer assigned to civilian casualty mitigation when the war began. One. For a war.
When the story broke, Trump told reporters: "Based on what I've seen, that was done by Iran." He provided no evidence. There was no evidence. The Tomahawk missile — a weapon used exclusively by US forces in this conflict — was photographed at the site by Iranian state media and authenticated by Bellingcat, the independent open-source research collective. A US official briefed on the preliminary findings confirmed to CBS News, PBS NewsHour, and NPR that the strike was likely American. Amnesty International concluded the same. Trump said it was Iran. Hegseth, standing next to him, said they were investigating.
Hegseth did say one true thing at the press conference where he announced they were investigating: "The only side that targets civilians is Iran." He said this about a strike his own military's preliminary investigation found was likely his own. He said it standing next to the president who had just blamed the victim for its own children's deaths. He said it days after dismantling the program specifically designed to prevent civilian casualties from happening. And then he went back to the podium the next day and said we were winning decisively.
Here is what Pete Hegseth has built in three weeks at the helm of this war: a daily messaging operation disconnected from the data his own military produces; a legal posture that experts across the ideological spectrum have called a march toward war crimes; an operational framework stripped of the civilian protection infrastructure Congress mandated and the military had spent years building; and a culture signaled from the top that the rules are for other people, that restraint is weakness, that the lawyers are the enemy, and that lethality is the only metric that matters.
Thirteen American soldiers are dead. More than 170 children were killed on the first day. The man responsible stands at a podium every morning and tells you it is the best day yet.
It takes money to kill bad guys, he said, when asked about the $200 billion his Pentagon is requesting from Congress.
That's next.
**Next in the Obliterated series: Two hundred billion dollars for a war the administration says is already won. (Part Three: The Ask)
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