Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has once again found himself the subject of mockery after debuting the names of several U.S. military operations that turned some heads.
In a caps-lock-filled X post on Friday, the former Fox News anchor listed three different military operations carried out by American personnel.
“OPERATION ROUGH RIDER = Freedom of Navigation for U.S. ships; OPERATION MIDNIGHT HAMMER = Obliteration of Iranian nuclear sites; OPERATION SOUTHERN SPEAR = Destroy Narco-Terrorists killing Americans,” Hegseth wrote in a post viewed 6.8 million times.
“POTUS means business—and the world knows it. Peace Through Strength.”
It wasn’t long before hundreds of ridicule-filled comments poured in—all sharing the same sentiment.
“If these were real mission names soldiers, sailors, airmens and marines are LAUGHING THEIR A**ES OFF,” wrote author and former United States Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer Malcolm Nance in part on a post on X that’s racked up 2.7 million views.
“I saw these names and initially thought it was a parody account,” added novelist Barry Eisler.
Some even offered their own name suggestions. “OPERATION HUSKY FARMBOY,” author Daniel Drezner wrote in one reply.
But Hegseth remained undeterred. On Friday, the 45-year-old posted a photo he had apparently taken of a television displaying Fox’s Jesse Watters Primetime, which featured a doctored image of Hegseth with lasers shooting from his eyes and holding a spear, captioned “OPERATION SOUTHERN SPEAR.”
The operation, which Hegseth formally announced this month, is the government’s ongoing lethal strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the East Pacific Ocean, which officials say are being used to transport narcotics to the U.S. At least 80 people have been killed in the strikes, which have been ordered without congressional approval.
An IPSOS/Reuters poll from last week revealed that just 29 percent of voters approve of the government’s extrajudicial killings, with a majority (51 percent) opposed to executing suspected criminals without a trial.
Additionally, an Oct. 29 report from Amnesty International found that “Operation Rough Rider,” a U.S. airstrike on a migrant detention centre in Sa’ada, north-western Yemen, in April—which killed and injured dozens of African migrants—caused “catastrophic civilian harm on vulnerable migrants, many of whom were held by the Huthi de facto authorities in the detention centre solely for their irregular immigration status.”
It’s been a big week for Hegseth. On Friday, the secretary installed new plaques at the entrances to his department that he now calls the “Department of War,” a name dreamt up by President Donald Trump.
Officially changing the name would involve overhauling the code on both internal and external communications systems, and replacing letterhead, badges, placards, and signs at offices and bases all around the world—which would amount to an estimated $2 billion.
