On September 2, 2025, the U.S. military carried out the first strike of its campaign against alleged drug boats. The target was a small boat carrying 11 men off Venezuela. According to what Adm. Frank Bradley later told lawmakers, it had turned around before it was hit. The first strike killed nine of them and capsized the boat. Two men survived and clung to the overturned hull. Bradley, then commander of Joint Special Operations Command, and the operations center watched them on live video for somewhere between 41 and 48 minutes, according to the various officials and lawmakers who have described it. After consulting his staff lawyer, Bradley ordered a second strike, which killed both men. Two more strikes sank the boat. That day Trump posted that the strike was carried out “on my orders,” that the men were “heading to the United States,” and that “The strike resulted in 11 terrorists killed in action.” The video he posted showed only the first strike. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “Instead of interdicting it, on the president's orders, we blew it up.”
The public learned about the survivors in stages. The Intercept reported on September 10, 2025, citing two officials, that people on board “were said to have survived an initial strike” and were then killed in a follow-up attack. Pentagon officials told lawmakers in briefings afterward that the second strike was done so the boat “would not pose a threat to navigation,” CNN later reported. Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, later said, “For months, in multiple briefings, the Department omitted the fact that there were two survivors in the initial September 2nd strike.” Then, on November 28, The Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. 'The order was to kill everybody,' one of them said.” It reported, citing two people familiar with the matter, that Bradley “ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth's instructions.”
What Hegseth ordered is the part in dispute, and it should be read carefully. The Post's account rests on unnamed sources. One source told CNN that before the operation Hegseth ordered the military “to ensure the strike killed everyone on board,” but that it was not clear whether he knew there were survivors. The New York Times, citing five officials, reported that his order “did not specify what should happen if survivors remained.” In a closed briefing on December 4, Bradley told lawmakers he never received a “kill them all” or “no quarter” order. Lawmakers in both parties relayed this. Sen. Tom Cotton: “Adm. Bradley was very clear that he was given no such order, not to give no quarter or to kill them all.” But Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on House Armed Services, described what Bradley did say: “The order was basically: Destroy the drugs, kill the 11 people on the boat.” So the order was lethal for everyone aboard, and that part is not disputed. What is disputed is whether it said that no one should be left alive. The Post stands by its reporting.
The administration's defense, in its strongest form, is that the two men were still combatants. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Bradley “worked well within his authority and the law, directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed.” Hegseth said on December 6 that “there were a couple folks who could still be in the fight,” citing drugs still aboard and another boat they could meet, and that “I would have made the same call myself.” House Speaker Mike Johnson said, “The individuals on that vessel were not helpless castaways.” Cotton, after watching the video, called all four strikes “entirely lawful and needful.” Hegseth said he watched the first strike live and then left: “I did not personally see survivors ... This is called the fog of war.” Trump said on November 30, “I wouldn't have wanted that, not a second strike,” and on December 2, “I didn't know about the second strike.” One earlier explanation fell apart. Officials had said the survivors were radioing for help, but CNN reported, citing three sources, that Bradley told lawmakers they had no radio. Smith said: “There are no radios.”
The lawmakers who watched the video did not agree on what it shows. Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said, “Any American who sees the video that I saw will see the United States military attacking shipwrecked sailors.” He added that they were “bad guys,” but “attacking shipwrecked sailors.” Smith described “basically two shirtless people clinging to the bow of a capsized and inoperable boat, drifting in the water.” CBS and CNN reported that the men were waving before the second strike. A U.S. official told The Intercept that Bradley “did not perceive their waving to be a 'two-arm surrender.'”
The law turns on whether the two men were still fighting. The Defense Department's own Law of War Manual says that “orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.” It also says it is “prohibited to conduct hostilities on the basis that there shall be no survivors,” in conflicts with non-state groups as well as between countries. The administration relies on another line in the manual: to count as shipwrecked, people must “refrain from any hostile act.” The Former JAGs Working Group, a group of retired military lawyers, said that giving and carrying out such orders, “if true,” would “constitute war crimes, murder, or both.” Which of the two depends on the administration's claim that the country is at war with cartels. Victor Hansen, a former military prosecutor, told CBS that if there is no armed conflict, “Then, it's murder under domestic law.” A U.N. special rapporteur made the same argument in September 2026 (see A UN Expert Finds 'Reasonable Grounds to Believe' the Boat Strikes Were Crimes Against Humanity of Murder).
Critics included conservatives. The Wall Street Journal's editorial board wrote that the president deserves legal latitude, “But that doesn't extend to shooting the wounded.” Sen. Rand Paul said there is a “broad consensus that it's illegal to kill people who are clinging to wreckage.” Sen. Lindsey Graham, a former Air Force lawyer, said shipwreck survivors “are no longer combatants.” Andrew Napolitano said Hegseth should be prosecuted. No outside law-of-war expert has been found defending the second strike on the record. The defense rests on the advice of Bradley's staff lawyer and on a classified Justice Department legal opinion.
The oversight ended quickly. The Armed Services committees of both chambers promised inquiries on November 28 and 29. On December 9 the House committee chair, Rep. Mike Rogers, said “It's done.” On December 18 the Senate committee chair, Sen. Roger Wicker, said, “I have seen no evidence of war crimes.” Neither committee issued a report or held a public hearing. Reed called for an independent command investigation. Congress did write one demand into the annual defense bill that Trump signed on December 18. It withholds a quarter of the travel budget for Hegseth's office until he gives the committees “unedited video of strikes.” No public record shows that he has. He told reporters, “of course we're not going to release a top secret, full, unedited video of that to the general public.”
Since then, three sets of impeachment articles have cited the strike. Rep. Shri Thanedar's, filed December 9, 2025, charge Hegseth with murder and conspiracy to murder. Rep. Yassamin Ansari's, filed in April 2026, refer to “illegal double tap strikes in the southern Caribbean” (see House Democrats File Five Articles of Impeachment Against Hegseth for War Crimes, Signalgate, and Obstruction of Congress). Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican, filed articles on September 15, 2026. They say that “Approximately 45 minutes later, while two survivors clung to the wreckage, a secondary strike was ordered, killing both survivors.” The House recessed on September 16 without voting on Massie's articles. The Pentagon inspector general opened a review in May 2026 of targeting across the whole campaign, not this strike specifically. A records lawsuit seeking the legal opinion and the videos was argued in federal court in June 2026; on September 30 a judge ruled against the government's main grounds for withholding the legal opinion in the ACLU's suit (see the October 2, 2026 update). In a later briefing, a Pentagon official said some of the people aboard “could be” victims of human trafficking rather than smugglers (see A Pentagon Officer Told a Classified Briefing That People Killed in the First Boat Strike 'Could Be' Trafficking Victims, Two Attendees Say). No one has been charged, and the video has not been released. The campaign as a whole is tracked in Trump's Undeclared Boat-Strike Campaign: At Least 231 Dead in 69 Strikes by September, and $4.7 Billion Spent by April.
Correction (September 21, 2026): this entry was rewritten. The earlier version said Hegseth ordered the follow-up strike after survivors were seen. The Post actually reported that his directive came before the first strike and that Bradley ordered the second. The earlier version also attributed Bradley's denial to the wrong article and left out that he said the order was to kill all 11 people aboard. Its campaign-wide material, about fentanyl, drug seizures and the president's statistics, has moved to the campaign entry.
Update (October 2, 2026): A federal judge has rejected two of the government's grounds for keeping the Office of Legal Counsel's September 2025 boat-strike opinion secret. In a 66-page opinion dated September 30 in the records suit the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed in December 2025, Judge Paul Engelmayer of the Southern District of New York ruled for the plaintiffs on the deliberative-process and attorney-client privileges. “The Memo binds DOD and defines the parameters of its authority to undertake boat strikes,” he wrote, and “Executive Branch officials have repeatedly publicly invoked the OLC Memo as the basis for the lawfulness of the boat strikes.” He has not yet ruled on presidential communications privilege, and he expects the classified-information exemptions to cover some factual parts of the memo but likely not its pure legal analysis. Within 14 days the government must file declarations and give the court the memo to review privately. Some headlines said he ordered the memo released; he did not, yet. The ACLU's Jeffrey Stein: “The public deserves to know how our government is justifying the cold-blooded murder of hundreds of civilians.”