Pete Hegseth

And these are rules written by like dudes in cloak rooms in Europe after World War I, because they thought that they could fight polite wars in the future amongst European nations.

when we live now in a world in 2024 where all of our enemies use all of their advantages against us, ignoring all the rules of war, and then expecting us to play by all those very same rules, where we're our largest critiquers in the middle of the process, and then we wonder why the war never ends, and why it perpetuates itself, and then why we're throwing our own guys in jail, because we've written rules that are impossible, that are written for us to lose, that are written for our guys to be in handcuffs.

I mean, I got a similar brief.

We had a JAG officer

Jagoff briefed our platoon in Iraq in 2005 in Baghdad prior to one of our first missions, and it was just standard ROE briefing.

He's like, so you see a man in the road and he's carrying an RPG, but it's not yet pointed at you.

And it was, you know, an enemy.

Can you shoot?

My guy's like, hell yeah.

No, you cannot.

But you cannot shoot until he's pointing that weapon at you.

And I just remember walking out, clear as day, I remember walking out of that briefing, pulling my platoon together and being like, guys, we're not doing that.

You know, like if you see an enemy and you know they're engaged before he's able to point his weapon at you and shoot, we're going to have your back.

And that comes back down to commanders.

And I felt like I could say that because I knew I had commanders echelons above me who would have our backs in that process.

And the New York Times and the left and Democrats would say, you know, all they do is take one incident and yell war criminal.

they never actually understand the context of what happened.

I mean, I got the same income on Eddie Gallagher.

Don't touch this story.

I talked to, don't touch it.