Former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall on Monday sharply rejected Navy Adm. Frank Bradley’s justification for launching a second strike on a vessel in the Caribbean while two wounded survivors were still holding on to the boat.
“Under normal circumstances, it’d be court-martialed. He’d be relieved of his duties, and he’d be court-martialed,” said Kendall, who served as Air Force secretary under former President Biden, during an appearance on MS NOW. “The administration makes up logic and rationale for the things it’s doing that defy all legal history and all precedent, and that’s basically what we’re seeing here.”
Several other former U.S. government and military officials have likewise described the so-called “double tap” strike as a violation of the U.S. law of war manual. Bradley is expected to deliver a classified briefing to lawmakers on Thursday as Congress continues to scrutinize the Trump administration’s operations in the Caribbean.
“Adm. Bradley was reported to have given an excuse, if you will, for the second engagement. That doesn’t hold water. These people were wounded. They were in the water. They were not a threat to anybody. Again, that’s a textbook example of a war crime,” Kendall said.
According to The Washington Post, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued orders to “kill everybody” aboard the ship as part of the Trump administration’s broader effort to clamp down on alleged narcotics trafficking in Latin America.
Hegseth has maintained that he did not authorize a second strike.
“You can’t kill survivors who can no longer fight,” John Yoo, who served as an adviser in former President George W. Bush’s administration, said Monday on CNN. “So, the admiral should not have obeyed the order that Secretary Hegseth gave. And even the soldiers who carried out the admiral’s orders should not have obeyed.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday that Bradley acted “within his authority and the law.”
Leavitt argued the operation was lawful because narcotrafficking groups had been designated foreign terrorist organizations, permitting “lethal targeting in accordance with the laws of war.”
That rationale conflicts with the U.S. war manual, which explicitly states that “orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.”
Legal experts told PBS the deadly strike runs afoul of both peacetime legal standards and the rules that govern armed conflict.
