For two weeks, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been fending off scrutiny over a second U.S. strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat from Venezuela. The hit killed two survivors who were clinging to the vessel’s wreckage after an initial U.S. strike. Hegseth now claims he “didn’t stick around” for the second strike and that Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley made the call. While it’s refreshing to see the media and Congress hold U.S. leadership accountable for what is assuredly an illegal attack, there is something ghoulish about parsing whether faceless men should have been killed in a second strike or left to cling to a disabled vessel until someone decided their fate.

Would it really have been a lesser outrage if the boat’s occupants had all died in the first blast, their identities uncertain and the kill chain shorter than ever? The legal distinction between an active combatant, already a dubious classification, and an incapacitated one matters, but it misses the larger point. Washington is widening the circumstances under which it uses lethal force. What’s new is not the violence, but its growing openness and the political showmanship behind it.

For two weeks, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been fending off scrutiny over a second U.S. strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat from Venezuela. The hit killed two survivors who were clinging to the vessel’s wreckage after an initial U.S. strike. Hegseth now claims he “didn’t stick around” for the second strike and that Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley made the call. While it’s refreshing to see the media and Congress hold U.S. leadership accountable for what is assuredly an illegal attack, there is something ghoulish about parsing whether faceless men should have been killed in a second strike or left to cling to a disabled vessel until someone decided their fate.

Would it really have been a lesser outrage if the boat’s occupants had all died in the first blast, their identities uncertain and the kill chain shorter than ever? The legal distinction between an active combatant, already a dubious classification, and an incapacitated one matters, but it misses the larger point. Washington is widening the circumstances under which it uses lethal force. What’s new is not the violence, but its growing openness and the political showmanship behind it.

Once cloaked in legalese and largely limited to active warzones, U.S. strikes are now carried out in international waters and blasted across social media. That shift matters. Openly acknowledged extraterritorial strikes, especially in places where the United States is not formally at war, operate under a different logic than covert missions, high-value target strikes and raids, or the “signature strikes” that defined the Afghanistan War era.

The danger today is the normalization of overt, highly publicized killings. A Pentagon that once kept such operations under wraps now uploads the footage to social media itself. This morbidly gleeful transparency may invite scrutiny, but it also creates a perverse incentive: lethal strikes solely for the sake of spectacle. Political theater, meant to project toughness or distract from policy failure, is replacing the harder work of addressing threats with........

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