Kelly points finger at Hegseth over missile that struck Iranian school

Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly said he believes the culture at the Department of Defense and a disregard for traditional military safeguards contributed to a missile strike on an Iranian girls' school.

The Pentagon has launched a formal investigation after a preliminary assessment found the U.S. was at fault for the strike, which killed at least 168 people. That came after President Donald Trump initially suggested Iran was responsible for the incident, even though it involved a Tomahawk missile, which are used by the U.S. military and not Iranian forces.

“I've got some suspicions here that a lot of this stuff starts at the top, you know, the leadership, and what's the environment you're creating, what's the culture of the service?” said Kelly, a retired naval pilot who flew 39 combat missions during Operation Desert Storm.

He pointed to comments by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who said that U.S. military forces would not be abiding by “stupid rules of engagement.” Those are rules that determine how soldiers can wage war, including who is a target and what steps they must take before escalating force.

“And if you're talking about, you know, ‘rules of engagement are stupid, and we're just going to go and blow everything up,’ and that's how these mistakes happen,” he said.

Kelly said those rules are in place for a reason.

“We have the most professional, capable fighting force in the world, and an accident like that — because of somebody taking a shortcut or not having the rules in place and the standard operating procedures on how you're making decisions on what to target — that's how you wind up with 150 dead kids.”

NPR reported that outdated intelligence may have contributed to the strike, because the school was formerly a part of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval base.

Kelly criticized the leadership at the Department of Defense for having too few intelligence officers in place to ensure those mistakes don’t happen following reports that Hegseth cut back civilian mitigation teams by 90% and that U.S. forces in the Middle East had only one staffer tasked with that duty.

“How does it happen? They were trying to hit a lot of targets very quickly with not a lot of due diligence,” Kelly said.

Hegseth said more than 15,000 targets have been hit since the conflict began.

The White House said the investigation into the cause of the strike is ongoing.

“This investigation is ongoing. As we have said, unlike the terrorist Iranian regime, the United States does not target civilians," White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said.