Ex-Pentagon official warns US 'blood lust' comes straight from the top

A former top Pentagon employee is blaming American "blood lust" that he says comes from "the top" as a key reason the U.S. is not only at war, but also bombed a girls' school that killed 168 people, primarily children.

Retired Master Sgt. Wes J. Bryant previously conducted a kind of war-risk assessment for the military, serving as the Pentagon Civilian Harm Policy Adviser and Analyst. On Thursday, CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked how the Iran school bombing could have been avoided.

Under the previous administration, there were about 200 people on the team that extended beyond the Pentagon to the entire national security apparatus. At the Pentagon specifically, there were about 30-35 on the team.

They were deemed "woke" and cut under President Donald Trump's administration. For Bryant, the cut was likely made because the first two words in the department's name included "civilian protection."

Bryant explained that while he was doing that work for the Pentagon, the team looked at the entirety of previous failures during the so-called "War on Terror." He said that they have worked to get better at not harming civilians during strikes. The ultimate goal has been "true precision warfare" and to avoid things like what happened in Iran.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was dismissive of the U.S.'s role in the deaths, saying that they're not being given credit for how much time they spend on trying not to kill civilians.

"If we're really this good, why are we having incidents like this in Iran, where the Secretary of Defense himself and our own combatant commander cannot even say whether or not they dropped a bomb here?" asked Bryant.

Bryant said that it isn't merely a moral or ethical issue, but there is a strategic interest in not killing civilians when they are trying to keep the people of Iran on the side of the U.S.

He closed by saying that all of this is coming from the macho culture that is a kind of thirst for carnage and brutality coming from Trump and Hegseth.

"You know we have this culture proliferated from the top of blood lust, of reveling in death and destruction and human suffering, of bravado for violence and power dehumanization, disregard for international law, all these things that safeguard the innocent, enable precision, warfighting things that are supposed to make us better than our enemies," he explained. "When you have that culture embodying the antithesis of everything we're supposed to stand for as American warfighters, everything else tends to slip. And that's exactly what we are seeing here."

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