A Friday report from Rolling Stone raised alarm bells inside defense circles over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, with one retired Army Special Forces officer warning his rhetoric reflects a “weird obsession with death for the sake of it.”

In the piece, Rolling Stone’s Kevin Maurer writes that he spoke with “more than a dozen officials — some former and some current Pentagon staffers who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation, as well as War on Terror veterans,” all of whom expressed concern that the U.S. may be drifting toward “another quagmire” in Iran.

Among the most striking critiques came from retired Army Special Forces officer Mike Nelson, who is also a member of the Atlantic Council’s Counterterrorism Project.

“He gets up at his press conferences and talks about how great it is that we’re just slaughtering these Iranians,” Nelson told Maurer. “That’s a necessary end to achieve goals through military force — you have to kill people to achieve them. That’s not the end. It’s a weird obsession with death for the sake of it.”

Additionally, according to a former admiral with whom Maurer spoke, “It’s the majors running a war now,” implying that Hegseth’s rhetoric feels like that of a more junior officer.

Another source, a former senior defense official who served during the War on Terror, “compared Hegseth to a child playing with toys,” according to Maurer.

“Hey, I want to fire a torpedo at an Iranian ship so I can say, ‘This is the first time since World War II that a submarine has sunk a surface vessel,’” the official said. “These guys are just a bunch of inexperienced buffoons.”

On Hegseth’s ability to explain the reasoning behind the war in Iran, another former Defense Department official told Maurer, “I’ve just seen nine different explanations of what we’re doing [in Iran] and why we’re doing it… All of them have some elements that I can accept. But when you cannot give an elevator speech, you’re in trouble.”

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