Pete Hegseth Talks About ‘Negotiating With Bombs.’ But Does He Have a Plan in Iran?

I n 2012, I was embedded with a Special Forces team in Afghanistan, working on a book about the forever war. It was a hot August day when one of the soldiers I was with spotted a little girl in a colorful dress with a knot of auburn hair standing along the side of a dusty road on the outskirts of Kandahar. Manning a machine gun in the rear hatch, he smiled and waved to her. He was fighting, he explained to me as we passed, so that little girl could go to school.

A noble sentiment, but one that lacked any of the stated objectives for why roughly more than 60,000 U.S. troops were stationed in Afghanistan at the time. It was 11 years after the attacks on Sept. 11, and the war had turned from a mission to rid the country of Al Qaeda to a sprawling, nation-building project focused on gender equality, universal education, and anti-corruption initiatives. 

The conflict became a paradoxical cycle. Americans couldn’t leave because the Afghan state was too fragile, but staying meant pouring resources into a project that had far exceeded the original goal of targeting Osama bin Laden. The soldiers I was embedded with were on their second, third, or fourth tours away from their families, risking their lives, many having lost friends on the battlefield. The war was the definition of mission creep. 

As I sat with that soldier in Kandahar, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was leading Concerned Veterans of America. His tenure ended amid allegations of financial mismanagement and personal misconduct. He no doubt recalls hearing Gen. David Petraeus in 2011 and Gen. John Nicholson in 2017 tell the American people that Afghanistan had “turned a corner” and victory was imminent. 

But victory never came. 

Today, 14 years later, Hegseth is leading the entire American military. As he began his second year in the role, the United States rushed into a war with strong echoes of Iraq and Afghanistan, raising the question of what, if anything, he learned from the War on Terror. 

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Hegseth’s supporters portray him as a brash military leader who has overseen “some of the most decisive operations in modern history,” chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell tells Rolling Stone in a statement. Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson doubled down, saying in a statement that the military has transformed from “a weakened, woke-­obsessed military” to “a lethal, mission-focused fighting force” under his leadership.

“Secretary Hegseth has restored America’s military to its rightful glory — and he’s going down in history as the best secretary of war this nation has ever seen,” Wilson said.

But a different picture emerges from those outside of Hegseth’s sphere. I spoke with more than a dozen officials — some former and some current Pentagon staffers who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation, as well as War on Terror veterans — all of whom share the same concern: that the country is headed into another quagmire.

But this time, there’s a man in charge who should know better.

ON MARCH 24, HEGSETH stepped to the podium. He wore a sharp navy-blue suit with an American-flag pocket square, his hair slicked back.

“Never has a modern military been so rapidly and historically obliterated, defeated,” he said proudly into the mic as President Donald Trump looked on behind him. Hegseth went on to talk about “destroy[ing] the enemy as viciously as possible.” He explained, “We negotiate with bombs.”

Ever since Hegseth took the mantle of secretary of war instead of secretary of defense, he’s been spoiling for a fight. First with airstrikes on suspected smuggling boats, then the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and now the war in Iran. Hegseth, according to Trump, was the first person to speak up when the administration was considering strikes on Iran. A former senior defense official joked to me that Hegseth got “liquored up” on success in Venezuela. 

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The military’s “operation” in Iran, as Trump has called it to avoid congressional approval, is a fight against an enemy that has killed and maimed American soldiers for decades. Presidents have been wrestling with how to counter Iranian influence since the 1980s, but only Trump has committed troops to a protracted conflict.

To some, it’s a rebuke of a political structure that Hegseth believes hindered victories under “woke” rules of engagement. It’s a geopolitical Count of Monte Cristo. Revenge porn for a subset of War on Terror veterans, right down to the operation’s name — Epic Fury. (The irony for some I spoke with is the force waging war in Iran and which undertook the daring capture of Maduro was the same one that served under President Biden, which Hegseth rages against. “That’s the ‘woke’ military you said were a bunch of bums that didn’t have the warrior ethos,” a former senior defense official tells me.)

One of Hegseth’s defining experiences was as a 26-year-old Army National Guard lieutenant assigned to a unit in the 101st Airborne. His unit was part of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team led by Col. Michael D. Steele. 

One of the battalion’s infantry companies was nicknamed “Kill Company,” according to a New Yorker story. The unit reportedly kept a whiteboard listing confirmed kills that included civilians. Known for being aggressive, two soldiers eventually pleaded guilty to murder for the killing of three detainees during Operation Iron Triangle in May 2006. An investigation found Steele had issued a directive to “kill all military-age males” during the operation — an order the soldiers claimed they were following. Steele denied using those specific words. “While I never specifically stated that every military-age male should be killed [during operations], the unit’s understanding fell within my intent,” Steele wrote later, according to The New Yorker. “This didn’t mean that soldiers should wantonly kill every man on the objective. It meant that individuals on the objective were combatants by status unless they made a clear and objective action to become a non-combatant (e.g., stood still with their hands raised).” Steele received an official reprimand, which ended his chances of promotion.

Hegseth was not part of the operation that led to the detainees’ deaths, but the aftermath left an impression that the Army’s rules of engagement were too restrictive, making soldiers fight lawyers as much as the enemy.

“If we’re going to send our boys to fight — and it should be boys — we need to unleash them to win,” Hegseth wrote in his 2024 book, The War on Warriors. “They need them to be the most ruthless. The most uncompromising. The most overwhelmingly lethal as they can be.”

In public, Hegseth appears to relish combat, using phrases like “death from above” to describe operations. This bombastic rhetoric fetishizing killing and destruction comes from a misguided belief that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were lost because they couldn’t fight where they wanted to, a belief a retired Marine officer who served in Afghanistan tells me is laughable.

“We imposed Western models on a non-Western culture,” the officer tells me. “We made deals with the devil, with people who were fundamentally corrupt. Rules of engagement is way down the list of reasons that we were operationally hampered.”

Mike Nelson, a retired Army Special Forces officer and a member of the Atlantic Council’s Counterterrorism Project, believes Hegseth’s frustration from his years as a junior officer in Iraq and Afghanistan colors his decision-making.

“He gets up at his press conferences and talks about how great it is that we’re just slaughtering these Iranians,” Nelson says. “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.”

To veterans, Hegseth still sounds like a junior officer talking to troops rather than the leader of the world’s most lethal force conducting a complex operation with geopolitical consequences. “It’s the majors running a war now,” a former admiral tells me. 

Since taking office, Hegseth’s bravado, tough-guy talk, and the kind of grievance-mongering that the MAGA base craves have aggravated some veterans. James R. Webb, a Marine Iraq combat veteran who worked as a military legislative assistant for Sen. Rand Paul, is appalled by the wanton destruction and tasteless war memes from the White House. 

“One of the things you learn when you’re in that environment is that violence and war sucks,” Webb says. “It is not to be celebrated. It is something that is strictly necessary when all other options are off the table.”

A former senior defense official who served during the War on Terror compared Hegseth to a child playing with toys. “Hey, I want to fire a torpedo at an Iranian ship so I can say, ‘This is the first time since World War II that a submarine has sunk a surface vessel,’” the official tells me. “These guys are just a bunch of inexperienced buffoons.”

But Hegseth should have learned from Iraq that there’s no way to kill your way to victory. Even Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld questioned whether the United States was “killing, capturing, smashing, or otherwise accounting for” more terrorists than they were creating in a leaked 2003 memo.

The professional American military has performed admirably in Iran. As of April 6, U.S. forces have reportedly hit more than 13,000 targets and sunk more than 155 Iranian naval vessels so far as part of Operation Epic Fury. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who has followed the past two dec­ades of war. The American military’s overwhelming firepower, precise planning, and logistical support are unmatched. It’s what comes next that has vexed policymakers and every American president since George Bush. 

“I’ve just seen nine different explanations of what we’re doing [in Iran] and why we’re doing it,” a former Defense Department official tells me. “All of them have some elements that I can accept. But when you cannot give an elevator speech, you’re in trouble.”

The Trump administration’s rationale for the war has gone from regime change to denying ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons to destroying Iran’s air and naval forces. 

Rep. Jason Crow, a Democrat from ­Colorado who served three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, tells me the United States has a terrible track record with regime change and nation-building, adding that Americans fought a 20-year war to replace the Taliban with the Taliban. 

“He talks about how great it is to slaughter Iranians. It’s a weird obsession with death.”

Mike Nelson, retired Army Special Forces officer and member of the Atlantic Council’s Counterterrorism Project

Now, it seems that killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may have made the world less safe. Crow tells me that Trump has destabilized the region by empowering an even more radical leadership in Tehran and putting American service members at unnecessary risk.

“I think we have to be prepared for a series of tactical wins and impressive operations by our military that will lead to an unknown end,” Crow says.

The Pentagon told The Washington Post it is preparing plans for weeks of ground operations in Iran, despite officials admitting to the newspaper that it is unlikely any of their previous goals of overthrowing the regime and putting a nuclear weapon permanently out of reach are achievable. It seems the U.S. military is mired in a conflict to solve a problem it caused with no clear exit strategy or end state.

“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 at a press conference. “Epic Fury is different.” 

I’ve spent a career writing about soldiers, and each time I witness them in the field, it renews a belief in their professionalism and determination. Like the Special Forces soldier who was fighting for that little girl on the dusty road. But soldiers deserve a clear mission and end state from their leaders. 

For all his rhetoric, 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, knowing they will die trying to complete whatever mission they’re given. 

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It’s one of the basic lessons from the War on Terror he should have already learned.