It is easy to dismiss Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s recent use of the phrase “no quarter” as barbaric, medieval, or un-American. Barbaric is fair, but the other two descriptions are not historically accurate.
Calling his rhetoric medieval flatters the modern world, while calling it un-American flatters the United States. No quarter language belongs to a recurrent American tradition that tends to surface when war is understood not as a contest against a reciprocal enemy, one like us, but as a campaign against a people who are racially inferior, or civilizationally irredeemable.
This is why Hegseth’s remark matters. Not because he sounded fierce or merciless, but because he reached for an old American grammar that indicates how some in the Pentagon perceive this war.
Start at the colonial beginning. In 17th century New England, English settlers and their Indigenous allies destroyed the Pequot fort at Mystic, set it ablaze, and killed many who fled the flames. John Mason and John Underhill both defended the attack afterward. Underhill’s account remains the most naked. The people running out of the fire, he wrote, were met “with the point of the sword”; “downe fell men, women, and children.” As if not enough, Underhill claimed he had God’s approbation. Scripture, he insisted, licensed the act.
Mystic matters not simply because it was cruel. Colonial war regularly was. It matters because it reveals a structure that keeps reappearing in American history. The settlers’ enemies were not treated as a reciprocal force that might surrender into some shared legal order. They were treated as an obstacle to settlement and dominion. Once that recoding happens, exterminatory conduct becomes virtuous.
The American Revolution did not erase that logic, though it added new phrases for it. One of the most durable revolutionary phrases in the United States was “Tarleton’s Quarter,” associated with the belief that Banastre Tarleton’s troops cut down Americans who were trying to surrender at Waxhaws. The phrase endured because it crystallized a fear central to all war: what if the enemy will not spare you even when resistance has ended?
That shared memory should have hardened the American commitment to quarter as a protection owed to enemies and demanded for oneself. In one sense, it did. The United States would later help codify the rule. But before and after that codification, American history kept generating situations in which quarter vanished when the enemy was cast outside the sphere of equality.
This pattern became brutally clear during the Civil War. The sharpest American no-quarter logic of the conflict attached not to ordinary agitations of the battlefield but to the Confederate refusal to recognize Black Union troops as lawful soldiers. Jefferson Davis’s government denied captured Black troops prisoner-of-war status, and the Confederate Congress threatened their white officers with death. Edmund Kirby Smith made the logic explicit in June 1863, urging the “propriety of giving no quarter to armed negroes and their officers.” Witnesses testified that, at Fort Pillow in 1864, Black soldiers were shot after surrender while Confederates shouted, “No quarter!” and kept killing.
For Confederates, a white Union soldier could be imagined, however bitterly, as a military opponent. But a Black Union soldier represented something else, an illegitimate combatant. For that enemy, some Confederates sought not regulation or discipline, but extermination.
Fort Pillow belongs at the center of any American history of no quarter. It shows a theory of justice. Reciprocal standing is a precious status that Black soldiers were denied.
Yet the same war also produced the Lieber Code, which became one of the foundational texts of modern laws of war. Article 60 said it was “against the usage of modern war” to resolve, “in hatred and revenge,” to give no quarter, even if the code still preserved a narrow exception for commanders in extremis who could not safely take prisoners. Later law closed that gap. The Hague Regulations barred declaring that no quarter would be given. Modern humanitarian law has gone further, prohibiting orders that there shall be no survivors, threats of that kind, or hostilities conducted on that basis.
The Civil War ended slavery. It did not end the idea of suspending reciprocity when the enemy was deemed racially inferior. This became painfully visible when new theaters were opened overseas.
After the surprise Balangiga attack that killed 54 American soldiers on the Philippines island of Samar on Sept. 28, 1901, Brig. Gen. Jacob H. Smith did not merely indulge in rhetoric. He told Maj. Littleton Waller, “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn,” order the island be turned into a “howling wilderness,” and fixed the age threshold at ten. The point was not to take revenge on armed fighters. It was to convert an inhabited landscape into a zone where legal principles of capture, distinction, and ordinary protection gave way to terror.
The pattern continued into the 20th century. As John W. Dower wrote of the Pacific war, “no quarter, no surrender” and “take no prisoners” had become ordinary combat language in a theater saturated by mutual racial contempt on both sides. Dower argued that racial contempt and exterminatory rhetoric were fused, drawing on older Western and American habits of dehumanization.
These episodes clarify what no quarter language does in American history. It is, of course, unlawful. But, more significantly, it is diagnostic. It appears when war is not imagined as reciprocal combat but as punitive domination over populations thought incapable of deserving the usual protections.
Hegseth’s phrase should be read in that light, not dismissed as a stray flourish. In the March 13 briefing, he paired “no quarter” with boasts that the United States was “decimating” Iran’s military and taunts that the country’s leaders had “gone underground” like “rats.” In surrounding statements, he used similarly totalizing language. None of that proves an unlawful operational order. But “rats” does more than register contempt. It recasts the enemy not as a hostile person who can be defeated, captured, or brought to surrender, but as vermin to be hunted in holes. To give quarter one would need to presuppose the opposite.
Some may wish to defend Hegseth’s “no quarter” rhetoric, claiming everyone knows what he meant and it is nothing more than an expression of resolve. Precisely for that reason it is dangerous. It announces a willingness to erase the point at which an enemy stops being killable. Legally, the phrase is not an obscure antique. It names a prohibited category in the law of war and in U.S. military doctrine. When an American defense secretary uses it, he is not merely sounding rough. He is invoking an action the institution he leads has officially rejected.
Americans like to tell a flattering story in which the United States civilized war. There is some truth in that story. The Lieber Code mattered. The United States did help shape the legal architecture of restraint. But American wars have shown how fast restraint weakens when the enemy is turned into a racial, colonial, or civilizational exception.
No quarter is not a synonym for toughness. It shows the enemy is no longer deemed a belligerent with standing. In American war, the Lieber Code’s demand for reciprocal restraint has repeatedly collided with Fort Pillow’s logic of denying quarter to enemies cast outside lawful war. We should not take comfort in thinking this language comes from some alien past. It does not. It is not an ancient warrior code, but a recurrent American license.
FEATURED IMAGE: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth provides updates on the continued military operations on Iran during a press briefing on the Iran war at the Pentagon on March 19, 2026 in Arlington, Virginia. The U.S. and Israel have continued their joint attack on Iran that began on February 28. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)