Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
A person needs a scorecard to discern just how far to the right the political and economic systems move with each passing day. When the US government moves as far as it now plans on the issues related to the laws of war, then attention must be paid. The Guardian reports “Pete Hegseth to overhaul US military lawyers in effort to relax rules of war” (March 13, 2025). This means serious trouble is brewing. For those liberals who thought that Trump’s track record on war would be better than the party of warmongers, the Democrats, this change in how the rules or laws of war are treated by the US military is cause for grave concern of the kind brought about by George W. Bush’s reaction to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. Bush used terror to create more terror.
In “Genocide and War” (CounterPunch, January 31, 2024), I write about the history of the laws of war beginning in ancient history and moving to contemporary society.
“The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, is expected in the coming weeks to start a sweeping overhaul of the judge advocate general’s corps as part of an effort to make the US military less restricted by the laws of armed conflict, according to two people familiar with the matter.”
“One of the complaints has been that Jags [judge advocate generals] have been too restrictive in interpreting rules of engagement and took the requirement that soldiers positively identify a target as an enemy combatant before opening fire to mean soldiers needed to identify the target having a weapon” (Guardian, March 13, 2025).
What the above means in practice is that soldiers can shoot at anything they want, the target with or without a weapon, combatant and noncombatant. These were called “free-fire zones”during the Vietnam War and led to the massive number of deaths of unarmed civilians.
Hegseth wants to “restore a ‘warrior ethos’ to a US military leadership he sees as soft” (Guardian, March 13, 2012). Was the Gulf War (1990-1991) soft, or perhaps the nearly 20-year-war in Afghanistan, or maybe the destruction of Iraq and Libya? Were the US invasions of Grenada, or Panama soft? Or how about the proxy wars in Syria, Gaza-West Bank, and Lebanon? The US seems to be anything but soft on war with between 700-800 military bases around the world and clandestine, secret wars always going on.
“…in his book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth derisively referred to the lawyers as “jagoffs” and expressed frustration with the laws of armed conflict as being too restrictive for frontline soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, which allowed the enemy to score battlefield victories.”
“…in Trump’s first term, Hegseth privately and publicly as a host on Fox and Friends appealed to Trump to pardon US soldiers accused of committing war crimes, including Gallagher, who was accused of murdering a captive Islamic State fighter in Mosul” (Guardian, March 13, 2025).
The Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute produced this summary of the human and monetary costs of wars that the US either directly or indirectly is involved in, or has been involved in. These costs will not be affected in any significant way by the current Trump administration, an administration focused on gutting social programs. This is the guns v. butter equation at its most obvious and vicious juncture! Of particular note in the Costs of War’s conclusions is that so-called defense industries only contribute in a modest way to the well-being of the economy and workers. Shareholders, weapons manufacturers CEOs and board members, and weapons industry owners are the real and substantive beneficiaries of these endless wars.
The Guardian article claims that the US is “not pushing for the US to not abide by the Geneva Conventions and the uniform code of military justice…” But Hegseth’s plan to subordinate and weaken the judge advocates would do just that and subject the military to the whims of the Trump administration.
Trump’s intention of ending the Ukraine war seems to be working. Several questions remain, however, about why he has taken this course of action. His admiration for Vladimir Putin is well known. He may want to draw Russia away from China and involvement in the Middle East. Trump is contemptuous of NATO and many European nations and their contribution to NATO funding.
The New York Times reports on March 16, 2025, that US airstrikes had killed at least 31 people in Yemen. The history of US involvement in that war-torn nation includes bankrolling Saudi Arabia in its war there (2015-2024). Yemen is yet another impoverished country that the US has set its sights on and part of the US’ and Israel’s wars of total military domination of the Middle East.
