On Wednesday’s broadcast of MS NOW’s “The Briefing,” Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) said Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s attitude that the U.S. military is all about killing people is “not healthy.”
Kelly said, “I think the secretary of defense has done the members of the military a big disservice by the way he’s been conducting himself in his job, getting on a stage, talking about killing people and lethality. And you know, that attitude from the top, it’s not healthy for members of the military to hear this. I mean, just the stuff he was saying today, so you could see why officers who have attended service academies—imagine if you went to West Point, and every day you’re walking by that plaque where it says when the law and orders are in conflict, you follow the law, and you think about that, you think about some of the things that the military is being asked to do. And you have a secretary of defense that’s talking about setting records, 10,000 targets struck in this period of time. And now we set a new record, 12,000. Now 14,000, by the way, on the heels of what seemed to be a horrific mistake, where a Tomahawk missile goes into a school and kills over 100 Iranian schoolgirls. But then, not to dismiss that and continue with this, with this attitude of we’re just about killing people.”
He added, “The U.S. military’s better than that. I mean, we’re supposed to be the good guys here who have a moral compass and have values, and could conduct ourselves with a certain amount of constraint and professionalism. And when I watch the secretary of defense, almost every single time he goes in front of a camera, I see the opposite of that.”
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