In the week since The Washington Post reported that Pete Hegseth had authorized killing the shipwrecked survivors of a boat strike in the Caribbean, numerous Democrats (and even a few Republicans) have warned that the SecDef may have committed a war crime. As military and international law experts have pointed out, the Defense Department’s own manual for the law of war points to killing the shipwrecked as its specific example of an illegal order. “It’s one of the shining red lines in the law of war,” said an expert in international law, who didn’t want to be named for fear of retribution from the White House. “There is no way to defend killing shipwrecked survivors. They literally write this very example into the Uniform Code of Military Justice.