Senator Kelly’s War With Secretary Hegseth Escalates With Latest Call for Firing

The long, bitter feud between Arizona Democratic Senator Mark Kelly and U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth reached a new level of acrimony on Friday with the lawmaker’s call for the firing of Hegseth after the latter’s controversial announcement that the December 3 execution of Foot Hood shooter Nidal Hasan will be public.

In an October 9 tweet, Kelly called livestreaming an execution “the kind of thing Iran and the Taliban do,” adding that “Pete Hegseth’s campaign of ‘maximum lethality’ and his comments about ‘killing people’ and now his desire to publicly execute a prisoner indicate to me that his expiration date in this job has long passed. He should be removed immediately.”

In voicing opposition to livestreaming the death by firing squad of Hasan, who killed 13 and injured dozens more in a December 2009 rampage at the Texas base, Kelly is not alone. House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) stated that such a move “is disturbing and makes a mockery of our legal system,” adding, “We are a democratic country and should take the rule of law seriously, not turn it into a spectacle.”

As he leads a charge against Hegseth, Kelly acts in a moral gray area, calling out what he sees as injustice without addressing the elephants in the room—namely his 2028 ambitions and his legal vendetta against Hegseth—political and military observers have told Arizona Globe.

Partisanship alone doesn’t explain Kelly’s actions, as even some GOP lawmakers have lent their voices to those criticizing the televising of the firing squad. Yet the politicized backdrop of Kelly’s demand for ditching Hegseth is hard to miss. It is the latest episode in a series of furious spats between the two.

A retired U.S. Navy captain, Kelly has taken issue with Hegseth’s efforts to bring back the highest physical standards for enlistees and to restore the warrior ethos that the secretary believes has eroded as heads of the services, acting on policy changes under Presidents Obama and Biden, have made diversity an ever-higher priority.

Kelly has publicly attacked Hegseth’s push for testosterone screening for active-duty male service members and for reserve members over age 30. Apropos Hegseth’s plans to oust between 20 and 30 percent of active-duty generals and admirals not aligned with the department’s stance, and his removal of officials Hegseth purportedly considered to be beneficiaries of DEI hiring, Kelly accused Hegseth of harming military readiness and called him “the most unqualified secretary of defense we’ve ever had.”

The Lawsuit

Kelly has also filed a lawsuit against Hegseth and the Department of War after Hegseth opened an inquiry into potential disciplinary actions against Kelly, including demotion, in response to the senator’s having appeared in a video with five other lawmakers, whose message was that service members can and should disobey illegal orders. The lawsuit alleges that Hegseth’s move violates Kelly’s right to freedom of speech under the First Amendment.

Only time will tell what the outcome of the lawsuit will be, but Hegseth is unlikely to succeed in demoting Kelly, given that the conduct that triggered the review process happened after the senator’s retirement from active duty, observed William Woodruff, professor of law emeritus at Campbell University School of Law and former chief of the litigation division in the Army’s Office of the Judge Advocate General. The District Court’s opinion enjoining Hegseth from disciplining Kelly through the retired grade review process is likely to withstand challenges, he said.

As a retiree, Kelly is subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Woodruff observed. Article 2(a)4) identifies “retired members of a regular component of the armed forces who are entitled to pay” as among the categories of service members covered, Woodruff noted. Hence, the question of insubordinate conduct under Article 91 is pertinent here. Having said that, questions of First Amendment-protected free speech are also obviously valid, and the Supreme Court has yet to provide clear guidance on the constitutionality of Article 2(a)(4) in such a context, Woodruff conceded.

There have, however, been cases in which military officials moved to recall to active duty a non-active service member they had reason to suspect of a serious offense, Woodruff continued, citing the well-known example of Timothy Hennis. A former Army sergeant, Hennis went on trial for the May 1986 murder of a family in Fayetteville, North Carolina, received a conviction and death sentence, then had his conviction overturned, until DNA testing in June 2006 raised new suspicions. “The state could not try him again because of double jeopardy. So a detective took the new evidence to the Staff Judge Advocate’s office of the 18th Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, and the Army looked at it and investigated further,” Woodruff recalled.

In September 2006, MPs went to Hennis’s front door in Tacoma, Washington, served him with papers recalling him to active duty, took him into custody and brought him back to Fort Bragg, where a court martial resulted in a death sentence. “Hennis has gotten no relief despite petitions to federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court,” Woodruff continued. Because the state was not the plaintiff, double jeopardy did not apply.

Lack of Consensus

Although Kelly takes the moral high ground in his recent public statements, possibly on the assumption that his status as a former Navy captain and combat pilot in the Persian Gulf War lends authority to his criticisms of Hegseth, it is clear that Kelly does not speak for all or even a clear majority of active service members or the veteran community, in the view of Susan Katz Keating, editor and publisher of Soldier of Fortune magazine.

The decision to livestream the execution of the Fort Hood mass shooter has produced decidedly mixed opinions. “I’m hearing views all across the spectrum,” Keating told Arizona Globe. “There are some, as you could probably imagine, saying, ‘Yes, absolutely, this is what the shooter should get. This is justice served. So livestream the execution.’ And then I’m also hearing from others who say, ‘This is a really bad idea.’”

Though Kelly may have an obvious interest in portraying himself as a principled critic of the excesses of the current administration, there are reasons for questioning the rationale for the viral execution that Hegseth envisions, others acknowledge.

“As for Nidal Hasan, his execution is certainly justified,” said Elaine Donnelly, president and founder of the Center for Military Readiness, a Livonia, Michigan-based think tank. However, that does not mean that livestreaming is the way to go. “Instead of an unnecessary public execution, which would distract from what Hasan did on that dark day in 2009, the Army should prepare a video setting forth the evidence and warning about the type of radicalism that led him to kill American soldiers in cold blood,” she opined.

Contrary to what Hegseth has said about the need to send a message, it is unclear that livestreaming the execution of a jihadist will have a deterrent effect, given that the perpetrator probably had no expectation of surviving what he conceived as a suicide attack, Woodruff said. “I’m not so sure that a public execution of Nidal Hasan accomplishes much, but it maybe elevates him to some sort of martyr status within the jihadist community,” he reflected.

Political Context

Kelly has made no secret of the fact that he is weighing a run for president in 2028, and frankly stated in a recent interview that he hopes to help the country “turn a page on this disastrous administration.” To some observers, that ambition fosters an obvious interest in impugning officials close to the current president. “Kelly is angling for attention to position himself for a presidential run,” said Donnelly.

According to Woodruff, Democrats are going to oppose everything President Trump does, and the controversial Hegseth nomination has been a target since Trump named him. “He wasn’t the typical retired general, nor was he a politician who had chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee or anything like that. The guy’s claim to fame was that he had been a National Guard major. So Trump’s nomination of Hegseth raised some eyebrows among the Democrats, and out came the pitchforks.”

For all Kelly’s efforts to portray him as an outlier unfit for the role, Hegseth is more popular with some members of the military community than certain portrayals of him in the mainstream media might lead people to believe, partly through his active participation in their workouts, Keating acknowledged.

“The military is such a massive creature that you get a real cross-section of beliefs,” said Keating. “I’ve heard things on both ends of the spectrum, but Hegseth has been very careful to spend time with the active-duty troops, and I think he gets a lot of traction with them when he shows up and he can actually do the physical training with them.”

The contrast with Lloyd Austin, who served as Secretary of Defense from 2021 to 2025 under President Biden, is hard to overlook, Keating said. “If you consider the likelihood of Austin getting up early in the morning and doing push-ups with the troops, that probably would not have happened,” she said.

Kelly’s office did not reply by press time to a request for comment.