In the first hours of the Iran war, on February 28, 2026, a strike hit a girls' elementary school in Minab, in Iran's Hormozgan province. Estimates of the dead vary by source — from 156 to 186 — but every count agrees on the fact that most of them were children. A preliminary U.S. military investigation has found American forces were likely responsible. The strike is now understood to have been a targeting error: stale intelligence had classified the school as part of an adjacent IRGC naval facility, a compound it once shared roughly 600 meters away. This desk states that plainly and without embellishment, because the facts don't need embellishment. What follows is about what made it possible, and what the government has done since to make sure it's never fully accountable for it. Iran War Tab →
What Was Dismantled Before the War Started
In 2006, the Pentagon formally added three words to its Principles of Joint Operations: legitimacy, restraint, and perseverance. Legitimacy was defined specifically as "the legality, morality, and rightness of the actions undertaken." That addition came out of decades of hard experience — the recognition that battlefield victories alone don't win wars, and that protecting civilians is inseparable from sustaining the public support any military operation needs to succeed.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth built his tenure on the opposite premise. In his 2024 book, he argued the military had gone "effeminate" by embracing diversity and inclusion. He pushed to discard the Geneva Conventions' noncombatant protections, calling them fighting "with one hand behind our back," and would not commit to honoring them when Senator Angus King asked him directly at his confirmation hearing. On September 5, 2025, he announced the Defense Department would be rebranded the "Department of War," telling the room: "We're going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality, violent effect, not politically correct."
A Pentagon Inspector General report — DOWIG-2026-084, issued May 13, 2026 — evaluated the department's implementation of its own Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan. It does not name Minab. It documents the prior degradation of the systems that existed specifically to prevent an event like it, including cuts to the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. Wes Bryant, the Pentagon's former chief of civilian harm assessments, has said that office was "severely curtailed" in the year before the strike. In the wake of Minab, The Atlantic has reported the Pentagon is now considering restoring some of what was cut. Hegseth has not committed to it, and even restoration would do little without a change in the rhetoric that accompanied the cuts.
Now Watch What the Government Is Racing to Prevent
On July 13, Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the administration intends to "dismantle the ICC — brick by brick, if necessary." The State Department's press release the same day promised a "whole-of-government response to systematically disable the ICC's ability to operate, target American servicemen or officials, or otherwise threaten American sovereignty."
A Republican operative close to the White House, Bill Cortese, told POLITICO's Nahal Toosi something more candid than the official language: that some administration officials fear that if Democrats retake power, "an unchecked ICC and other international institutions are going to unleash a wave of litigation against this administration and anyone associated with it." On July 25, the State Department separately praised Venezuela's withdrawal from the treaty establishing the ICC, welcoming what it called Caracas's "partnership on American-led efforts to dismantle the corrupt and worthless ICC." Venezuela Oil →
This desk is not asserting that Minab specifically triggered the ICC campaign — no administration official has said so, and the public timeline shows concern about international prosecution predating this particular strike. What can be stated is that a documented, U.S.-military-acknowledged mass casualty event involving dozens of children sits in the recent record while the same administration works to strip away the international mechanism that exists to examine exactly this kind of event. Whether that's the reason or simply the most vivid illustration of why they'd want to, the effect is the same either way.
It Isn't an Isolated Doctrine
The same "maximum lethality, not tepid legality" posture is visible in a second theater. Since September 2, 2025 — three days before Hegseth's Department of War speech — the administration has conducted strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing more than 220 people on the claim that they were narcotics traffickers. The administration has offered no evidence supporting that characterization for the people killed. Pentagon and DEA officials told the Washington Post in late July that the strikes have not reduced the cocaine supply reaching the United States — if anything, falling prices suggest there's more of it now, with trafficking organizations simply shifting routes. Legal scholars have drawn a direct parallel to Rodrigo Duterte's extrajudicial drug-war killings in the Philippines. Trump called Duterte in 2017 to congratulate him for doing "an unbelievable job on the drug problem." Duterte is now in ICC custody at the Hague, charged with crimes against humanity for the same pattern of unlawful killing this administration is now replicating.
The U.S. military's finding that American forces were "likely responsible" for the Minab strike is preliminary, not a final determination. This desk treats it as the most credible currently available account, not as a closed legal finding.
No administration official has stated that the ICC dismantlement campaign is a response to Minab specifically, or to any other single incident. The connection drawn in this piece is this desk's inference from timing and consequence, not a documented admission.
Casualty figures (156–186) vary across Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, NPR, and Iranian government sources; this desk has not resolved the discrepancy and presents the range rather than a single number.
Whether the Pentagon actually restores the civilian-harm protection staffing under consideration, and whether Hegseth changes the rhetoric that accompanied their removal, is unresolved and worth tracking directly.
This desk has not established that the Caribbean and Pacific boat strikes and the Iran war strikes share a common command decision beyond the shared timing and shared rhetorical framework documented above.