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In a matter of days, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth could join a very exclusive club: Only two other Cabinet members have ever been impeached by the House…and one of them died 136 years ago.

Such impeachments are exceedingly rare because Congress generally treats them as a last resort — and because presidents can dismiss misbehaving officials themselves. But President Donald Trump has stuck by Hegseth through all his multitudinous misjudgments, from his cringe obsession with the Crusades to deadly strikes on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean.

Lawmakers will consider several of those alleged misdeeds when they vote on advancing Hegseth’s impeachment at 5:30 pm Eastern. The articles of impeachment — filed by Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican — specifically allege eight offenses, several of them related to the war in Iran and the fact that Congress never authorized it.

Hegseth is unlikely to be ousted, however, even if the House votes to impeach. (The Senate has a higher threshold for conviction, and it’s never removed a Cabinet secretary.)

But the Republican-led push to impeach Hegseth is still a striking rebuke of both the man and his uber-macho, unrepentant military philosophy. And that philosophy deserves our scrutiny, regardless of whether Hegseth keeps his job: It’s a matter of life or death. Often literally.

Hegseth has dubbed his philosophy “maximum lethality,” and it’s more or less exactly what it sounds like: Military operations should deploy overwhelming force — to hell with “woke” distractions like civilian protections or legal oversight.

“No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement,” Hegseth said in a 45-minute lecture to senior military officials last year. “Just common sense, maximum lethality, and authority for war fighters.”

Hegseth has been hashing out this doctrine of military maximalism for years — since his own time in the US Army National Guard. As the weekend co-host of Fox and Friends, he regularly defended service members accused of war crimes. He later published a book that argued progressive policies had ruined the military, titled The War on Warriors.

But even among “warriors” — Hegseth tellingly loves that word — this philosophy is pretty radical. Former military officers and legal experts say Hegseth’s dismissal of legal restraints breaks with generations of American military doctrine.

As early as the Civil War, the US propagated formal rules addressing the treatment of prisoners, the protection of civilians, and limits on violence in armed conflict. (“Military necessity does not admit of cruelty,” those rules read.) And decades later, the US helped prosecute Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg and shape the postwar Geneva Conventions.

That’s not to say the US military has always practiced what it preached. Infamously and horribly, it has not. But the US did at least preach restraint, whereas Hegseth has sought to make “rules of engagement” a dirty word on par with “DEI” and “climate change.”

He has championed flashy shows of overwhelming force, like the initial joint strikes that took out much of Iran’s leadership; ordered strikes on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean when a search and seizure arguably would have sufficed; and oversaw the capture of a foreign president, in his home, without congressional authorization.

Behind the scenes, Hegseth also cut funding and staffing for programs that mitigate and document civilian harm and fired the senior military lawyers who provide legal oversight to combat operations.

But Hegseth’s swaggering philosophy may be coming back to bite him. For one thing, overwhelming military force did not yield the decisive victory in Iran that Hegseth and Trump promised. For another thing, the phrase “maximum lethality” shows up several times in Massie’s articles of impeachment.

Massie is not, needless to say, a huge fan of the doctrine. “He has been effective, and that’s what we’re impeaching him for,” Massie said of Hegseth on CNN. “His effectiveness in breaking the law and violating the Constitution.”

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