Charlie Savage

This was not a capture operation.

They weren't aiming to disable the engines and then go arrest the guys.

The aim was to kill the people on the boat, sink the boat, destroy the purported drugs on the boat.

So that's not in dispute.

But...

The question is whether the orders he gave contemplated that the first missile wouldn't accomplish all those things and that there might be shipwrecked survivors.

And if that happened, should they be killed too?

Or was the order silent on that possibility?

But whatever was in those orders...

We have been told that Hegseth gave no additional instructions to Bradley once the attack commenced.

In other words, he didn't see or hear that there were initial survivors and then say something.

But this is something Congress needs to figure out.

And regardless of what Hegseth said or said,

intended.

The next question is, what did Admiral Bradley understand his orders to be?

Is his intent, we want to kill those two people?

Does he say anything that leaves a contemporaneous record that would explain whether he thought he was specifically trying to kill shipwrecked survivors or was just hitting what he thought was a lawful target again?

Then this starts to get kind of esoteric because what difference does it make if his intent was to specifically kill these people versus...

destroy the vessel if the same missile is hitting the same object, causing the same damage regardless.

And this is part of the reason why trying to apply the laws of armed conflict to this situation starts to become very unsatisfactory.