US Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth defends controversial second strike on alleged drug boat in the Caribbean Sea.

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has denied seeing any survivors from a military strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean Sea in September, before the second deadly strike, which has prompted calls for an investigation into possible war crimes.

Speaking at a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Tuesday, Hegseth said he watched the initial strike on September 2 in real-time but did not witness the controversial follow-up strike.

“As you can imagine, at the Department of War, we’ve got a lot of things to do, so I didn’t stick around… I moved on to my next meeting,” Hegseth said at the meeting presided over by President Donald Trump. The Trump administration is calling the Department of Defense the Department of War, though the president insists he is a peacemaker who has brokered multiple ceasefire deals.

Hegseth said that Admiral Frank Bradley, who heads special operations in the US military and was the mission commander for the September 2 attacks, had made “the right call” to carry out the second strike and “eliminate the threat”.

“I did not personally see survivors,” Hegseth said, adding that the scene of the strike had been obscured by fire and smoke.

“This is called the fog of war.”

Hegseth said the Trump administration fully supported Bradley and had empowered commanders to do “difficult things in the dead of night on behalf of the American people”.

Hegseth’s comments came amid growing demands for accountability over the double-tap strike, which Democratic lawmakers and legal scholars have condemned as a likely war crime.

“Secretary Talk Show Host may have been experiencing the ‘fog of war,’  but that doesn’t change the fact that this was an extrajudicial killing amounting to murder or a war crime,” US Senator Chris Van Hollen said on X, referring to Hegseth’s previous career as a host on Fox News.

“One thing is clear: Pete Hegseth is unfit to serve. He must resign.”

Scrutiny of Hegseth’s role has mounted since The Washington Post reported last week that military commanders carried out a second strike on two survivors clinging to the vessel’s wreckage to comply with his directive that no one be left alive.

Hegseth blasted The Washington Post report, which cited two unnamed people familiar with the matter, as “fake news”, “fabricated” and “inflammatory”.

The Pentagon’s own manual on the laws of war calls orders to fire on the survivors of shipwrecked vessels “clearly illegal”.

The Trump administration has carried out strikes on at least 22 vessels in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific as part of a controversial military campaign against alleged drug traffickers.

At least 83 people have been killed in the strikes, which many legal scholars say amount to extrajudicial killings and are illegal under international law.

The Trump administration has so far not made public any evidence to back its assertions that these boats were carrying narcotics, were headed to the US, or that they were being commandeered by members of proscribed cartels.