BREAKING: Rep. Seth Moulton Says Troops Are Calling Hegseth’s Pentagon the “Department of War Crimes”
Pete Hegseth has picked up a brutal new nickname from the people who serve under him, and it’s not one he’s going to be bragging about.
Rep. Seth Moulton, a Marine combat veteran, told MSNBC that active-duty Marines have started calling Hegseth’s Pentagon the “Department of War Crimes.” The reason, according to Moulton, is simple: the administration’s decision to target Iranian civilian energy infrastructure, which Moulton flatly called a war crime. “It’s meant to hurt civilians,” he said. “This is the same stuff we criticized Vladimir Putin for doing in Ukraine.”
The nickname fuses Hegseth’s own self-styled rebrand of the Defense Department as the “Department of War” with the growing list of legal and ethical violations critics say he has overseen since taking office.
The accusations are serious and piling up. Airstrikes on Yemen killed an estimated 224 civilians. Strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities were ordered without clear congressional authorization. Reports have surfaced of an alleged illegal no-survivors order issued during Caribbean anti-narcotics operations. Trump’s invasion of Venezuela proceeded the same way, with no vote from Congress.
More than 1,600 civilians are reported dead in Iran since the war began, including over 100 children killed when a missile struck a school in the south of the country.
Hegseth has also reportedly earned another nickname around the Pentagon: “Dumb McNamara.” The comparison to Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara is not a compliment. McNamara sent a generation to slaughter and carried the reputation of a strategic genius while doing it. Hegseth, a former weekend cable news host, is seen as carrying the same appetite for escalation without the intellectual cover.
When asked for comment, a Pentagon spokesperson pointed to Hegseth’s own words from a March press conference: “They target civilians. We do not.”
His own troops apparently disagree.