The remarkable thing about the paintings of Rudolph Wacker may be how unremarkably good they are (“New Objectivity”).
Sitting with friends the other day, I noticed every single person was saying their favorite painting of a set on the wall was by Wacker.
Winter Landscape, 1934. Rudolf Wacker
I mean, it’s like he had a way of capturing a scene in such an authentic way as to beg the question of why it’s even a scene. It’s a literal depiction of nothing in particular, a pleasing still life “magic of the everyday” that draws you in to wonder why.
During the rise of National Socialism in the 1930s, Rudolf Wacker created encrypted still lifes, which, in a subtle manner, allow us to relate to the abysses and threats of the time.
The Nazis certainly didn’t appreciate his perspective, as they tortured Wacker to death in 1939.
MIT has materialized what the CIA has wanted since early in the Cold War: deniable, unattributable, precision lethality.
…tiny flying robots could be deployed to aid in the search for survivors trapped beneath the rubble after a devastating earthquake. Like real insects, these robots could flit through tight spaces larger robots can’t reach, while simultaneously dodging stationary obstacles and pieces of falling rubble. So far, aerial microrobots have only been able to fly slowly along smooth trajectories, far from the swift, agile flight of real insects — until now. MIT researchers have demonstrated aerial microrobots that can fly with speed and agility that is comparable to their biological counterparts.
Insect sized robots at MIT, offering autonomous targeted micro lethality. Reminiscent of 2018 Micro Air Vehicle Lab (MAVLab) bird-sized versions. Source: MIT
The “humanitarian” framing is the… beard. All the “cameras and sensors” they mention as “future work” is sheer euphemism. A payload at this scale doesn’t need to be explosive; a guided needle, a directed toxin, a micro-charge at close range even inside of critical infrastructure.
The evolution from surveillance drone to armed drone to precision kinetic strike happened over roughly two decades. In terms of recent Lebanon and Caribbean strikes, we’re talking about people who market the R9X Hellfire (“Ninja”) blades as precision reducing collateral damage — amputation and destruction as humanitarian language.
Same rhetorical pattern here.
The argument that smaller and more precise is more ethical has been the justification for every escalation in targeted killing capability starting even before “Tarzon” (TAllboy, Range and aZimuth ONly) bombs or shoulder-fired mini-nuclear “Davy Crockett” rockets were claimed to be how America should win the Korean War cleanly.
The American racial encoding of this “frontier” weapon named after a genocidal folk hero (M28/M29 Davy Crockett) entered service in May 1961. It was promoted as a “surgical” strike, in photos like this one, where a white soldier poses as a “big dick” who needs soldiers of color to load and unload him. The Crockett rocket fired an “atomic watermelon” with 20 tons radioactive TNT equivalent up to 3 miles away.
This new technology announcement compresses the “precision” death timeline even more significantly because:
Scale advantage: A paperclip-weight robot is essentially undetectable. No radar signature. Visual acquisition nearly impossible.
Penetration capability: Explicitly designed to go where “traditional quadcopters can’t” — through rubble, gaps, screens, gates, grills, broken windows
Autonomous targeting: The saccade movement they’re celebrating mimics how insects localize and identify — that’s targeting behavior, not just navigation
And look at the funding: Office of Naval Research, Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The search-and-rescue framing is a dual-use press release. The money trail tells you the most likely uses and customers.
The CIA failed in the 1970s to get their Insectothopter (let alone robotic birds of Project Aquiline) operational, for precisely the reason this MIT team solved: crosswind instability.
The Insectothopter. Source: CIA Archives
The 1970s robotic dragonfly design couldn’t handle more than a light breeze, an important context for everything MIT just demonstrated:
Wind disturbances of >1 m/s handled
Aggressive maneuvers with <5cm trajectory deviation
Autonomous control (AI) architecture that compresses decision-making to distributed and real-time
Sarah Bergbreiter explicitly notes in the news release by MIT that while the controller still runs externally, they’ve demonstrated onboard execution.
“This work is especially impressive because these robots still perform precise flips and fast turns despite the large uncertainties that come from relatively large fabrication tolerances in small-scale manufacturing, wind gusts of more than 1 meter per second, and even its power tether wrapping around the robot as it performs repeated flips,” says Sarah Bergbreiter, a professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, who was not involved with this work. “Although the controller currently runs on an external computer rather than onboard the robot, the authors demonstrate that similar, but less precise, control policies may be feasible even with the more limited computation available on an insect-scale robot. This is exciting because it points toward future insect-scale robots with agility approaching that of their biological counterparts,” she adds.
That’s the tell.
External computation means tethered, lab-bound demonstrations with oversight. Onboard computation means operational without oversight. She’s essentially confirming a roadmap to fly around and find out.
Search-and-rescue framing isn’t just cover for academic institutions appropriating funds, it’s how the Lincoln Laboratory gets graduate students to create weapons without moral injury or considering what happened when MIT’s death machines, known as Operation Igloo White, illegally destroyed Cambodia (Operation Menu).
Scene from “Bugging the Battlefield” by National Archives and Records Administration, 1969Cambodia Genocide Map: US Bombing Points 1965-73, Source: Yale
Hegseth has tried to claim his only job is to be offensive, dismissing “defense” of America as someone else’s job. So be it. Let’s review what his loud rejections of duty have meant so far in terms of military preparedness and execution.
I. Pattern
June 14, 2015. Pete Hegseth throws a double-sided axe on live television.
Behind the target: Master Sergeant Jeff Prosperie, West Point Band, five children.
Hegseth wasn’t authorized to throw. He’d practiced once. He threw anyway.
The axe struck Prosperie’s elbow, cut his wrist. Prosperie’s statement:
Poor decision, obvious negligence, should not have happened, could have been avoided. When shooting or throwing, always know what is behind your target.
He sued. The incident is documented.
The military now appears to be preparing for Hegseth’s removal through coordinated disclosures like these.
The question is whether Trump tries to cut ties or double down on those exhibiting a pattern of being unfit for duty.
II. Preparation
January–August 2025: Hegseth fires the Army and Air Force Judge Advocates General to remove prevention of war crimes.
March 2025: Hegseth shares classified Yemen strike details via Signal with his wife, brother, Fox News producer, and journalist Jeffrey Goldberg. IG report confirms Hegseth pushed classified information to insecure networks, endangering soldiers.
Before September 2: Hegseth approves written contingency protocols. If survivors take “hostile action,” Hegseth says kill them, where hostile action is redefined to include the wounded and defenseless who ask for help.
III. Execution
September 2, 2025. First strike.
Two survivors on burning wreckage. One radios for rescue.
Admiral Bradley, executing Hegseth’s pre-approved criteria, orders a second strike.
Pentagon Law of War Manual, Section 7.3: hostile acts are “acts of violence.”
A shipwreck survivor radioing for rescue is neither.
Major General Steven Lepper, 35 years as military lawyer, former Deputy JAG of the Air Force, on record:
Once we have rendered a vessel capable of survival only if it’s rescued, our obligation then shifts as well from attack to rescue. And so under those circumstances, even in the best light possible, I don’t think that anyone can say that this was a lawful order.
This is common sense as much as exact law.
Hegseth authored kill criteria in advance that lacked any moral justification. The Trump administration has floated a theory that is attenuated by the most basic logic:
Any restaurant is now a military target (profit from selling food pays for something that could harm Americans, such as cigarettes or alcohol).
A man’s eyeglasses are military targets (he can see America).
A shipwreck survivor’s pen makes him a military target (he could write a message in a bottle for rescue).
The point: the Trump administration launders summary execution through four degrees of separation (goods → sale → profits → weapons) that are so patently absurd they make evidence of community or prosperity the target for military strike. That’s a significant tell for historians.
This is 1919 Elaine, Arkansas mass murder logic when Black farmers gathered in a Church to complain of being underpaid. Hundreds were shot dead by federal troops. This is 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma mass murder logic when “Black Wall Street” openly displayed prosperity. Mass unmarked graves to this day still hide the dead from napalm bombs dropped by white supremacist militias (oil company men) on Black neighborhoods.
This is… American racist rhetoric of assigning non-whites the label of “drugs” to dehumanize and murder them.
Now Trump says anyone on a boat anywhere can be killed by Hegseth’s orders because someone has something that could be sold. The through-line should be clear: assign non-whites a dehumanizing label (“drugs,” “uppity,” “threat”) for soldiers to murder them with legal cover.
Tribunals have seen this argument before. They rejected it and shot the officers who made it.
The distinction matters. No soldier can be a professional when there is no defense of the profession left.
V. Documentation
The following exist:
Strike Bridge logs: automatic record of all communications during the September 2 operation
Hegseth’s execute order
Pre-approved contingency protocols
Unedited video of both strikes
Hegseth’s public statements contradicting each other across five days
Hegseth’s social media posts celebrating military murder of civilians posing no immediate threat
Congress has requested these documents.
VI. Allies’ Unfavorable Assessment
Britain suspended intelligence-sharing with the Pentagon. Canada distanced itself. Allied nations have made complicity calculations.
VII. War Crime Precedents
At Fort Pillow in 1864, Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s forces murdered Black Union soldiers attempting to surrender. General Forrest wrote that the massacre was intentional:
It is hoped that these facts will demonstrate to the Northern people that the Negro soldier cannot cope with Southerners.
Source: “Hymns of the Republic: The Story of the Final Year of the American Civil War”, S. C. Gwynne, p 19
Three months later, forces under General Lee did the same at the Battle of the Crater, butchering Black soldiers who surrendered, then murdering prisoners of war afterward.
The Union’s response established that killing the defenseless is murder, not war.
Think about that precedent and what it means when someone attempts to reverse it. This American history matters, not least of all because “Make America Great Again” and America First are both racist platforms that reject defeat of the Confederacy.
General Grant stopped these butchers on the battle fields and again in the ballot boxes. And yet, here we are again.
Foreshadowing horrors in WWI trench warfare, General Lee at Cold Harbor entrenched to massacre soldiers and then deny the wounded care as his explicit terror tactic. Source: “This was not war” Welt.de
Hegseth’s tattoos tell you the hateful traditions he follows, rejecting post-Civil War values and clear military doctrines. His overt Confederate loyalties (e.g. forcing enemy Confederate names onto U.S. military bases) and protocols—kill any survivors who cry for help—show you he means it.
When General Anton Dostler transmitted Hitler’s order to execute captured commandos, his defense was he only passed along the order, didn’t originate it.
No soldier, and still less a Commanding General, can be heard to say that he considered the summary shooting of prisoners of war legitimate.
Dostler was shot by firing squad, December 1, 1945.
The Peleus case is even more directly parallel. In 1944, German U-boat commander Heinz-Wilhelm Eck torpedoed a Greek steamship, then spent five hours machine-gunning the wreckage and rafts. His defense: he wasn’t targeting survivors, he was eliminating debris for “operational necessity.”
The British Military Court rejected it:
You cannot shoot up rafts full of shipwreck survivors and then hide behind semantics about what, exactly, you were “really” aiming at.
Eck and two officers were shot by firing squad, November 30, 1945.
Hegseth’s defense argument that survivors became valid targets by radioing for help is the same Nazi argument in different words.
The precedent is very clear.
Three days after the strike on shipwreck survivors, to the press and then again in Quantico, Hegseth gloated:
Maximum lethality, not tepid legality.
Hegseth now has done worse than Nazi General Dostler, as he didn’t claim to transmit an order from above. He originated the criteria. He approved the protocols before the operation. Bradley executed what Hegseth authorized, keeping detailed paper trails capturing the criteria.
Firing squad is on the table.
18 U.S.C. § 2441, the War Crimes Act: grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions by U.S. nationals are federal crimes. If death results, the penalty includes death.
VIII. Documented
Hegseth threw an axe without authorization and hit a soldier. Documented.
Hegseth fired the lawyers who would have stopped him. Documented.
Hegseth approved kill criteria for survivors in advance. Documented.
Hegseth’s criteria were executed. Two men dead. Documented.
Hegseth celebrated on social media. Documented.
Hegseth contradicted himself on camera for five days. Documented.
The man who couldn’t be trusted with an axe now commands the American military. The file he’s building is his own prosecution.
The SS nameplate, the mocking memes, the “maximum lethality not tepid legality”—those aren’t bugs, they’re features for the white nationalists saying they own the White House. But constitutional loyalists appear to be gathering Hegseth’s prosecution file in real time; the documentation systems are running, and Hegseth keeps feeding them like the infamous Nixon tape recorders.
Bottom line: This is far more than political theater because an actual safety mechanism inside the Pentagon is rolling out to stop war criminals.
Hegseth is losing the information war every time he opens his mouth to order “maximum lethality” against unarmed civilians, or brags about another Confederate base naming, or thumps his anti-American tattoos.
Source: Twitter
The file he’s building isn’t a highlight reel. It’s an air-tight prosecution of himself as a war criminal, reminiscent of racist Confederate and Nazi leaders who were tried, convicted and… executed by America.
The Defense Secretary’s account of a war crime has shifted dramatically, and suspiciously, over five days:
Date
Who
Claim
Friday
Hegseth
“Fake news.” Does not deny “kill everybody” order.
Sunday
Trump
“Pete said that didn’t happen.” “I believe him 100%.” Also: “I wouldn’t have wanted that, not a second strike.”
Monday
Leavitt
Confirms second strike. “Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes.”
Monday
Hegseth
Posts Franklin the Turtle meme. “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.”
Tuesday
Trump
“I didn’t know about the second strike.”
Tuesday
Hegseth
Claims he left the live feed before the second strike. “Didn’t personally see survivors” due to “fog of war.”
Bombing While Intoxicated?
On Sunday, Trump said “Pete said that didn’t happen.”
By Tuesday, Trump admitted he didn’t know about the second strike.
So Trump was defending Hegseth “100 percent” against something Trump now admits he knew nothing about?
On Monday, the White House said Hegseth “authorized” the strikes.
By Tuesday, Hegseth claimed he wasn’t even watching and it was too foggy to see the thing he had been celebrating so hard that he promoted the guy who did it.
Are they drunk on the job?
What Has Not Happened
The issue is not who pushed the button. The issue is the policy of executing survivors. The allegation is that Hegseth set that policy. Whether he personally watched is irrelevant to whether he ordered “no survivors” as standard procedure.
Hegseth has spent months dismantling protections against war crimes. The current deflection, arguing about who pushed the button on the second strike, is a familiar tactic to bury accountability.
No one has technically denied the actual worst part, that Hegseth gave a “kill everybody” directive before the operation began.
Pentagon Pete Has a Nuremberg Problem
The principle established in the post-WWII war crimes trials, and codified in subsequent international law, is command responsibility: commanders are criminally liable for war crimes committed by forces under their control if they ordered them, knew about them, or should have known and failed to prevent them.
“I wasn’t watching” and “I delegated authority” are confessions.
The Yamashita standard explicitly prohibits commanders from ceding operational command to subordinates as a defense.
Under Geneva Protocol I and the Rome Statute, constructive knowledge is sufficient. A commander who fails to keep himself informed can be held responsible.
Hegseth confirmed he gave Bradley authority to “eliminate the threat” and “stands by” the decision. That’s not a defense—that’s establishing the command structure that makes him liable.
General Tomoyuki Yamashita claimed he didn’t know about the atrocities his troops committed and couldn’t have stopped them. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that commanders cannot cede operational command to subordinates as a defense—operational commanders must exercise their full authority to prevent war crimes, and “neither failure to supervise subordinates nor ambiguous orders” exculpates them. He was hanged.
Hegseth’s tattoos tell you what he believes: crusader crosses, “Deus Vult,” the mythology of holy war without mercy. That ideology has a legal name when it becomes policy.
General Anton Dostler was the first German general executed for war crimes after World War II. His crime: passing Hitler’s Commando Order, which mandated “no pardon” for captured commandos, to a subordinate who carried out the executions.
Dostler’s defense was that he “had not issued the order, but had only passed it along” from his superior. The tribunal rejected it:
No soldier, and still less a Commanding General, can be heard to say that he considered the summary shooting of prisoners of war legitimate.
He was shot by a 12-man firing squad.
Hegseth’s defense is that he gave Bradley “complete authority” and wasn’t watching.
The precedents say that’s no defense.
That’s admission of war crime.
The Peleus case is even more directly parallel. In 1944, German U-boat commander Heinz-Wilhelm Eck torpedoed a Greek steamship, then spent five hours machine-gunning the wreckage and rafts. His defense: he wasn’t targeting survivors, he was eliminating debris for “operational necessity.”
The British Military Court rejected it:
You cannot shoot up rafts full of shipwreck survivors and then hide behind semantics about what, exactly, you were “really” aiming at.
Eck and two officers were shot by firing squad, November 30, 1945.
Hegseth’s defense—that survivors became valid targets by radioing for help—is the same failed Nazi argument in different words.
Peleus (1944)
Hegseth (2025)
Torpedoed ship, survivors on wreckage
Missile strike, survivors on wreckage
Machine-gunned rafts for hours
Second strike ordered
Defense: “targeting wreckage, not survivors”
Defense: “hostile action” (radioing for help)
“Operational necessity”
“Still in the fight”
Three officers shot by firing squad
?
Congress Must Act
The War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. § 2441) makes grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions by U.S. nationals a federal crime. If death results, the penalty can include death.
This isn’t abstract international law. It’s Hegseth violating a U.S. criminal statute.
The Armed Services Committees have oversight responsibility. A credible allegation that the Secretary of Defense commanded the execution of shipwreck survivors demands investigation.
The U.S. established these precedents. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Yamashita. The U.S. military tribunal shot Dostler, the British shot Eck and his officers. The U.S. Congress wrote 18 U.S.C. § 2441. Do those things still mean anything, or were they just for other people’s war criminals?
Hegseth is on television confessing to command structure. The statute is clear. The only question is what America stands for.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
