Pete Hegseth seems like the kind of guy who keeps a bucket list.

If he does (keep a bucket list), sinking a warship with a torpedo’s the sort of thing you’d expect to be on it. Along with getting black out drunk on a bros-only trip to Cancún and waking up with a Crusader slogan tattooed on your bicep.

On Wednesday, America’s 45-year-old “war secretary” boasted to reporters at a Pentagon briefing that the US military was indeed responsible for the sinking of an Iranian ship off the coast of Sri Lanka, where more than six-dozen sailors died after their vessel was harpooned by the US Navy.

The ship, Hegseth sneered, “thought it was safe in international waters.” “Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo,” he added, sounding every bit like a 13-year-old playing Call of Duty. Or a 10-year-old playing Battleship in the 1980s.

The search and rescue effort was left to Sri Lanka, whose navy and air force, such as they are, retrieved at least 30 people from the ocean and whisked them away to a hospital in a Galle suburb.

“We found people floating in the water,” a spokesperson for the island said. “Later on, we found out they belonged to an Iranian ship.”

That ship was the IRIS Dena, and it was on its way back to Iran from a port in India. Little did the crew know that “quiet death,” as Hegseth put it, was lurking below the surface.

If anyone was curious as to what it looks like when a US submarine torpedoes another country’s warship, Hegseth released the video above.

Not that it matters — because plainly the Trump administration has abandoned any and every pretense to caring about decorum — but the ship was in India at Narendra Modi’s invitation. Specifically, the vessel was “in town,” so to speak, for a ceremonial maritime exercise in the Bay of Bengal.

The Bay isn’t a terribly long way from the Persian Gulf, but it’s not right next to it either. That suggests the US went on a hunting expedition with the express intent to sink the IRIS Dena, which Janet Yellen sanctioned in 2023 in connection with Iran’s efforts to supply Vladimir Putin with drones for use in Ukraine. Hegseth called it Iran’s “prize ship.”

I’d ask if the sinking’s legal, but… well, again, the Trump administration demonstrates even less regard for international law than America exhibits in the normal course of empire and hegemony, which is really saying something.

There were 180 people aboard the IRIS Dena when Hegseth destroyed it. As the AP wrote, describing the scene Wednesday at the coastal hospital in Sri Lanka, “Iranian sailors’ bodies were arriving in trucks and being stored in a makeshift mortuary.”

Meanwhile, NATO shot down a (likely wayward) Iranian missile which very nearly entered Turkish airspace. I can only assume that projectile lost its way. Iran has no cause to fire on Turkey, which is generally friendly with the regime.

While mainstream media coverage understandably played up the Article 5 implications of a deliberate Iranian attack, Recep Tayyip Erdogan would scarcely need the help. If, for whatever reason (and I want to emphasize that there is no such reason), Tehran decided to start a fight with Ankara, Erdogan would finish it, with or without anybody’s help.

Coming back to Hegseth, Pete told the media Wednesday that within days, the US and Israel will have complete, unfettered freedom of movement in Iranian airspace. In case anyone was confused about the implication, he clarified: America will be able to dole out “death and destruction all day long.”