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The Trump-Netanyahu war on Iran is being led by a new generation of military personnel, by a decidedly different Pentagon than the one that waged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Where once somber, straight-laced reports on activities were given by military professionals who studied or partook in the successes of the First Gulf War, the crop of generals and civilian military leaders that have led America into war against Iran today were brought up on the failures that followed it, and the environment of social media that today’s average-age soldier and sailor grew up navigating.
That has manifested in a markedly different messaging trend, one obviously designed to reflect today’s hyper-technologized form of war, but which is simultaneously disturbing the nation witnessing it. Out of no mouth is this more evident than the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth.
Hegseth’s rhetoric during the 16 days of war on Iran has rattled a country that was already largely in opposition to new wars, having seen objective after objective fail while American governments ran up enormous amounts of debt and created conditions of chaos that led to millions of deaths in 7 countries. Rather than a tactful, on-message, presentation of exactly why the US would benefit from spending $1 billion a-day bombing Iran, they’ve witnessed a word salad filled composed of one part tough guy general act, one part Call of Duty-style military romanticism, and one part of what sounds to be sheer psychopathy.
“We’re playing for keeps,” Hegseth said, in an example of the first instance, during a briefing on March 4th. “Our warfighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the president and yours truly”.
“If you kill Americans, if you threaten Americans anywhere on earth, we will hunt you down without apology and without hesitation and we will kill you,” Hegseth was quoted as saying in an X post from US Central Command (CNETCOM) on March 8th.
“Iranian leaders [are] looking up and seeing only US and Israeli air power every minute of every day, until we decide it’s over, and Iran will be able to do nothing about it,” Hegseth said, in an example of the second instance. “This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be”.
In that second briefing, he added that US jets over Iran are “controlling the skies, picking targets” and bringing “death and destruction from the sky all day long”.
This was the second of several disturbing comments where it seemed the civilian leader of the military was relishing in a conflict that has killed 1,500 Iranian civilians, wounded 4x that many, and killed several dozen others all over the region. Earlier, Hegseth described the sinking of an unarmed Iranian naval ship visiting Sri Lanka as a “quiet death”.
Last Friday, at a time when the military situation behind the crisis resulting from the Strait of Hormuz closure was the last thing on reporters’ minds, Hegseth continued with his disturbing language.
“We will keep pressing. We will keep pushing, keep advancing. No quarter, no mercy for our enemies,” he said in what many have described as a violation of US and International war crimes laws. No quarter isn’t just a catchy phrase found in military sword or shooting video games, it refers to the accomplishing of military objectives without taking prisoners, and indeed killing any opposing combatant—which constitutes a war crime.
It’s perhaps not a surprise that Hegseth said that out loud, although he contends he didn’t mean it in the literal sense. His boss has let similar sadistic comments slip. Trump said that he himself asked his general staff why the unarmed ship had been sunk, not captured, and told reporters that one of them had replied, “Sir, it’s a lot more fun doing it this way”.
When asked by CBS News’ Major Garrett in a March 7th briefing about reports that Russia provided information to Iran to help them target US bases in the Middle East, Hegseth explained there wasn’t anything to worry about, before adding “the only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they’re going to live,” without stipulating he meant combatants.
“If you kill Americans, if you threaten Americans anywhere on earth, we will hunt you down without apology and without hesitation and we will kill you.” – Secretary of War Pete Hegseth pic.twitter.com/l0jkXxI74y
— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) March 8, 2026
Call of Duty
For the mercifully uninitiated, Call of Duty is an extremely-long-lived video game franchise known as a first-person shooter, wherein the player takes control of a US or British soldier and sees through their eyes, shooting enemies (usually non-descript Middle East militia types, Russians, or Wehrmacht/Imperial Japanese soldiers in the case of the World War II game editions) throwing grenades, or calling in air support.
A particularly seminal version of Call of Duty was released in 2007 entitled Modern Warfare, which broke from the World War II game tradition and introduced many Western gamers to the kind of war and weaponry America had been experiencing in Iraq and Afghanistan. The game and its sequels Modern Warfare II and III, repeatedly added new top-of-the-line US weaponry, making gamers inadvertent amateur observers regarding the US military arsenal.
In particular, it introduced millions of young Western gamers to the view that unmanned drones and warplanes have on the battlefield, one which would be instantly recognizable in CENTCOM’s social media feeds, where virtually every day there are black-and-white videos of Iranian military assets supposedly being blown up by US airpower, while the captions celebrate.
A concerned mother might note the disturbing similarity between the actual feeds used in airships and bombers and those in their sons’ video games, and indeed, Call of Duty franchise founder and developer Chance Glasco, revealed that Call of Duty’s parent company Activision-Blizzard tried to get him and his team to make the next edition of the game around a war with Iran back when they took over the franchise in 2010.
A video montage posted to (and then removed from) the official White House X account shows literal gameplay from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, in which the player goes on a “kill streak”.
“This doesn’t surprise me,” commented Glasco on the post. “I remember after Activision took over… there was a very awkward pressure from Activision for us to make the next CoD about Iran attacking Israel. Luckily the vast majority of our devs were disgusted by the idea and it got shot down”.
According to Middle East Eye, Call of Duty has raked in $31 billion in the 20 years it’s been releasing titles.
“While a conflict between Iran and Israel never formed the main storyline for any other game in the series, the 2022 title Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II featured the Quds Force, a specialist branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,” the Eye reported. “That game features the assassination of General Ghorbrani, a character based on the Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani, whom the US killed in a missile strike in Baghdad in 2020”.
JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY. 🇺🇸🔥 pic.twitter.com/0502N6a3rL
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 6, 2026
‘Slopaganda’ and ‘Lethalitymaxxing’
It’s not just CENCOM and Hegseth who are using X to generate interest among certain subsects of society, but the White House and the Pentagon too.
On February 6th, the Dept. of War’s Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering posted an image of a US soldier with his face blurred behind a caption “Lethalitymaxxing”. Mathew Cantor, writing for The Guardian, spares us the time of figuring out what exactly that means and why it’s being used by the most powerful military in the history of the world, but basically it is an attempt to piggyback on a particularly repellent brand of internet-fueled masculinity.
The post text wrote “Low Cortisol. Locked in. Lethalitymaxxing,” which also references this seedy culture of obsession with personal appearance, and would only make sense to a precious small community of overly-online young men.
While the White House may have deleted the Call of Duty-themed tweet, it hasn’t removed another propaganda video that splices together images from various big-budget films and television shows such as Breaking Bad, Tropic Thunder, Top Gun: Maverick, Man of Steel, Deadpool, Braveheart, and Yu Gi-Oh among others. Dubbed “Slopaganda” by David Mouriquand at Euronews, it attracted the ire of at least one of the stars pictured therein.
A U.S. Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker refuels a U.S. Navy F/A-18F Super Hornet over the middle east during Operation Epic Fury. pic.twitter.com/3z9UzXyLt9
— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) March 12, 2026
“Hey White House, please remove the Tropic Thunder clip,” Ben Stiller, who starred and co-wrote the film, posted in reply. “We never gave you permission and have no interest in being a part of your propaganda machine. War is not a movie”.
While dedicating at least half the social media budget to disproving claims made by the Iranian IRGC, particularly as regards videos made with AI, CENTCOM had no qualms about giving their F/A-18F Super Hornet a nice AI-assisted makeover for a publicity post about how cool it is that it can be refueled in midair. That post was made while CENTCOM was investigating whether one of the same models of refueling aircraft depicting had crashed over Iraq, which it had, killing all 6 US airmen aboard.
Since the start of the aggressive surprise attack against Iran, each Trump Administration official has been seemingly happy to contradict the others, leaving most Americans with little doubt that there was no imminent attack forthcoming from Iran, and that there’s no immediate plan for how to end the war. This must be considered to have influenced the strange decision making of the Administration’s propaganda teams, who are using disturbing and sloppy methods to try and get the American people on board that often minimizes the deadly serious destruction raging across the Persian Gulf, farther afield in Israel, and in financial markets around the world. WaL
PICTURED ABOVE: Promotional imagery from Call of Duty Modern Warfare II, released in October 2022. PC: Activision.
