Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, told soldiers under his command in Iraq to ignore legal advice about when they were permitted to kill enemy combatants under their rules of engagement. The anecdote is contained in a book Hegseth wrote last year in which he also repeatedly railed against the constraints placed on "American warfighters" by the laws of war and the Geneva conventions. Hegseth is currently under scrutiny for a 2 September attack on a boat purportedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean, where survivors of a first strike on the vessel were reportedly killed in a second strike following a verbal order from Hegseth to "kill everybody".