When the United States went to war with Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spoke of “shock and awe” but also of precision, restraint, and the protection of civilians. When James Mattis oversaw the intensification of strikes against ISIS in 2017, he assured the public of his commitment to “get the strategy right” while maintaining “the rules of engagement” to “protect the innocent.” The language was clinical, sometimes cold, but it acknowledged that sending Americans to kill and die is a grave act requiring sober justification.
Pete Hegseth has thrown that tradition in the trash. Since the first bombs fell on Iran on February 28, the Defense Secretary has conducted press briefings that sound less like Pentagon podium appearances and more like post-game trash talk — grinning through action-movie one-liners, dismissing questions about civilian casualties as liberal media bias, and treating the most consequential military operation since Iraq as a personal validation of everything he preached during his years as a Fox News host.
From Fox to the Pentagon
The transformation of American war rhetoric didn’t happen overnight. Casey Ryan Kelly, a communication scholar who has studied MAGA rhetoric for a decade, argues that Hegseth’s language represents something new: not ignorance of what democratic norms demand from a wartime defense secretary, but a deliberate refusal to comply with them.
The contrast with his predecessors is jarring. On March 2, Hegseth bragged about the “awe-inspiring lethality” of American weaponry before declaring: “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win.” Two days later, he dismissed press questions about casualties: “Tragic things happen; the press only wants to make the president look bad.” Then came the line that drew the sharpest reaction: “This was never meant to be a fair fight. We are punching them while they are down, as it should be.”
The rhetoric escalated from there. “Turns out the regime who chanted ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel’ was gifted death from America and death from Israel,” he said with a visible grin. “They are toast and they know it.” The White House amplified the tone by posting a video that spliced footage of real airstrikes on Iran with killstreak animations from the video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare — a sequence in which players are rewarded for killing multiple opponents without dying.
Kelly identifies this as “kill talk” — a verbal strategy typically used on new military recruits to deny the enemy’s humanity and disguise the costs of violence. “Hegseth addressed the public as a squad leader addresses military recruits,” Kelly writes. The repetition of words like “death,” “killing,” “destruction,” “control,” “warriors,” and “dominance” framed violence in heroic terms detached from reality.
The Masculinity Machine
Hegseth’s appointment was itself a statement. A former Fox & Friends weekend host and Army National Guard infantry officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, he had no experience running a large bureaucracy, no senior Pentagon role, and no background in defense policy. His confirmation hearing was consumed by allegations of sexual assault and excessive drinking — charges he denied. He was confirmed by a single vote, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tiebreaker.
What Hegseth brought was something Trump valued more than credentials: the ability to perform dominance on camera. In the MAGA media ecosystem where Hegseth built his career, “owning,” “dominating,” and “triggering” opponents is the currency that matters. Restraint is weakness. Nuance is emasculation. The goal is not to explain policy but to project power — and to make anyone who questions it look foolish.
This ethos has reshaped the Pentagon’s public posture. Within his first month, Hegseth fired the military’s top judge advocate generals — the lawyers responsible for ensuring compliance with international law — calling them “roadblocks.” He dissolved the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response program, the Pentagon’s only dedicated effort to prevent civilian casualties. He renamed the Department of Defense the “Department of War,” a symbolic but revealing reversion to pre-1947 nomenclature.
When pressed on the bombing of the Minab girls’ school that killed over 165 children on the war’s first day, Hegseth said the matter was “under investigation” and pivoted to Iranian casualties caused by Iran’s own defenses. He has not mentioned the school by name in any subsequent briefing. Asked whether the Pentagon used AI-assisted targeting in the strike, he declined to answer directly, saying only that “we use every tool at our disposal.”
A Culture of Impunity
The rhetoric is not merely aesthetic — it shapes policy outcomes. Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown law professor and former Pentagon official, warned that Hegseth’s language creates a permissive environment for violations. “When the defense secretary says there are ‘no stupid rules of engagement,’ that message travels down the chain of command,” she told NPR. “Soldiers on the ground hear that as permission.”
The numbers suggest the permission is being taken. Even before the Iran campaign, the number of US strikes worldwide since Trump returned to office had surpassed the total from all four years of Biden’s presidency. In Somalia, strikes increased sixfold. In Yemen, a US airstrike hit a migrant detention center, killing 61 people in what Amnesty International called an indiscriminate attack. The CHMR program that might have flagged these risks was gutted months before the Iran war began.
Retired generals have pushed back cautiously. Admiral James Stavridis, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, told MSNBC that “the language coming from the Pentagon is not consistent with the values of the institution.” General David Petraeus warned that “tactical messaging that celebrates killing without strategic context is counterproductive — it fuels recruitment for the adversary and erodes allied support.”
The pattern extends beyond Hegseth. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz told Fox News the strikes were “like taking out the Death Star.” Trump himself said the operation was “perfectly executed.” The fusion of entertainment language with military operations is not accidental — it is the communication strategy of an administration that views war through the lens of content creation, where engagement metrics matter more than strategic coherence.
Kelly’s analysis lands on a simple but devastating conclusion: “When the public most needs explanation and justification for the actions of their government, the powerful owe the public neither explanation — nor comfort.” That is the message. The medium is a grinning man in a suit, standing where Mattis once stood, telling the country that rules are for losers and dead children are the price of winning. Whether Americans accept that bargain — or recoil from it — may determine not just the course of this war, but the kind of country that emerges from it.
Original analysis inspired by Casey Ryan Kelly from Asia Times / The Conversation. Additional research and verification conducted through multiple sources.
By ThinkTanksMonitor
