Alex Horton

ship strikes a Navy vessel and it goes down or it's basically a wreck that can't function or move or fire back and there are sailors in the water,

unless they are engaging you with a weapon, they are essentially, as the law says, shipwrecked.

They have no ability to do anything except wade in the water and try to survive.

They have no ability to retreat.

They certainly don't have an option to get away from you.

And they have very few, if any, ways where they could play a trick on you and try to ambush you if you came to retrieve them.

So there are very clear protections.

And this came out of World War II when this happened on both the Allies and the Axis side of people who were shipwrecked getting engaged when they couldn't do anything about it.

So now the rule for...

international war and lawfare is you need to protect people who are shipwrecked and you can't shoot them again in a circumstance like this.

Now, there is room for nuance.

How destroyed was that boat?

Did Bradley make a determination that it was still seaworthy?

That part's unclear at this moment.

So there is some wiggle room if you want to say they were legitimate targets because they could have gotten out of there.

We're still trying to understand the contours of that order, that verbal order.

You know, the manner in which he gave it.

Was it a swashbuckling, swagger type of thing, as he has grown to do as the defense secretary?

Was it a formal directive to Bradley and how many people heard it?

These are all things we're still trying to figure out.