Hegseth Dismisses Testimony of US Soldiers Who Said They Were Put in Danger

Accounts by U.S. soldiers who survived a deadly strike by Iran in Kuwait that contradicted the Pentagon’s narrative are “falsehoods,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth suggested in a contentious hearing in the House on Wednesday.

Rep. Pat Ryan (D-New York) asked Hegseth about a CBS report finding that soldiers were commanded to relocate to the U.S. base at a hub in the Port of Shuaiba about a week before the U.S. and Israel launched the war, despite officers knowing that it would be a likely target for retaliatory strikes. Indeed, on the first full day of the war, Iran struck the facility, leaving six soldiers dead and over 20 wounded.

“No counter drone capabilities, no counter rocket systems, no counter mortar or counter artillery, not even the basic overhead protection you and I had 20 years ago in Iraq, and now, six of our soldiers are dead,” Ryan said.

“The next day, you downplayed the attack. You said it was a ‘squirter’ that squeaked through fortified defenses,” Ryan went on. He pointed out that soldiers interviewed by CBS said that, while other soldiers in the region were instructed to “get off the X,” meaning the danger zone, a few dozen were instead put at the port outpost, where there was effectively zero protection from drone and other aerial strikes, they said.

“That is obviously in direct contradiction to what you said from the Pentagon podium the next day. So are you saying that these soldiers who survived this horrific attack are lying?” Ryan asked.

“Before the commencement of the conflict, we put in maximum defensive posture,” he said. When Ryan tried to interject, Hegseth said: “Can I speak, or are you just going to monologue falsehoods all over the place? We moved 7,000 troops off of the X based on the intel…. Because we knew what Iran was going to try to strike.”

He said that the deaths of the soldiers were “tragic” but the “consequence of conflict.”

Following that, Rep. Chris DeLuzio (D-Pennsylvania) asked Hegseth if he agreed with Department of Defense chief spokesperson Sean Parnell’s assertion that reporting by CBS on the vulnerability of the hub was “not true.” The lawmaker asked if Hegseth thought the soldiers were lying.

“You are disparaging me that I don’t care about the passing of our troops,” Hegseth said, becoming angry and insisting that the military did everything possible to protect troops. “That’s disparaging and smearing in every way. Nobody cares more about the fate of our troops,” he said, before being reined in by House Armed Services Committee chair Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Alabama).

Hegseth also became testy at other points in the hearing. Earlier in his testimony, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) asked Hegseth if he knew how much the war is costing U.S. households in terms of rising costs for fuel, food, and other goods — which the secretary dismissed as a “gotcha.”

“I would simply ask you what the cost is of an Iranian nuclear bomb,” Hegseth said. “You’re playing gotcha questions about domestic things.”

“You’re saying it’s a gotcha question to ask what it’s going to be in terms of the increased price of gas and food?” Khanna responded incredulously. “It’s an increase of $5,000 a year for American households…. You don’t even know what the average American is paying. You don’t know what we paid in terms of the missiles that hit the Iranian school, you don’t know what we’re paying in terms of gas.”