The Pentagon has named one of its own public affairs officials to run the publication Stars and Stripes, and he will keep his Pentagon job while doing it. This places a single official inside both the office that shapes the military's message, and the newsroom charged with covering it independently.

As a Marine combat veteran, I have no reservations about seeing Nidal Hasan’s execution carried out. But by making it a public spectacle, we have given this coward a gift.

Seventeen years have passed. Few people thought about him anymore. He likely believed his death would come quietly, without fanfare, without an audience, and without another opportunity to inspire would-be jihadists.

Instead, we have allowed our desire for revenge to take precedence over our own security interests.

Consider this: What would happen if ISIS captured an American intelligence officer and executed him on live television?

Would Americans cower in fear? Or would we rally around his death?

Would recruiting offices see a surge of volunteers eager to retaliate?

Would others donate money, organize, or find their own ways to take action?

Why would we assume our enemies would respond any differently?

Hasan has been given a gift. He will not live to see the consequences of his execution, but he can now imagine them. He can die believing his legacy will inspire others.

Perhaps even those who might otherwise have remained on the sidelines, content to hate America from behind a keyboard, will find the motivation to cross the line into violence.

That is the danger of turning a terrorist into a spectacle.

We should never confuse revenge with strategy. Our collective desire for retribution can undermine the very security objectives our military exists to achieve. Killing an enemy and defeating his cause are not necessarily the same thing.

They could push him off the Grand Canyon in his wheelchair, quietly and without an audience, and let him die in shame.

His death should merit little more than a small newspaper notice.

No ceremony. No spectacle. No final opportunity to turn himself into a martyr.

Instead, we have made him a front-page celebrity.

And we did that ourselves.

Curious what y’all think though.

Pete Hegseth has announced that an upcoming firing squad execution will be livestreamed to the public. “I doubt questions of justice are Mr. Hegseth’s real motivation,” Phil Klay, a novelist and a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq war, writes in a guest essay for Times Opinion. “His career has long mixed celebrations of violence with disturbingly little concern for whether the people we kill are enemies.”

Phil continues:

A public execution and social media toughness cannot long distract from strategic failure. Men with real accomplishments on the battlefield don’t tend to talk this way. George Washington thought war a “plague” he wished “banished from the earth.” Ulysses S. Grant complained that “I am called a man of war, but I never was a man of war,” and said, “I never went into the Army without regret and never retired without pleasure.” Dwight Eisenhower declared, “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.” None of these men would fit into the “warrior culture” Mr. Hegseth models, because they took the horror and the moral stakes of war seriously.

It’s hard to confront the two decades we devoted to a failed war in Afghanistan. What is the human cost of what we wrought? What, practically, do we need to change so that we never do that again? Answering those questions truthfully takes courage, especially if you’re the sort of soldier for whom the war’s failure wasn’t just a human tragedy, but a personal humiliation. Not everyone can rise to the challenge, not when you can take refuge in a humiliated nationalism which insists, without much evidence, that all your problems would be solved with more cruelty, more celebrations of violence.

Read the full piece here, even if you’re not a subscriber.

Just another item on the long list of why veterans are broken.

I don’t like this firing squad execution. Seems barbaric. Not sure how the active duty personnel who will participate will react.

Source: Military.com