Opening
The United States military has not put a soldier to death since 1961. Not one execution in 65 years. That streak is about to end, and the method the Pentagon chose sounds like something out of another century: a firing squad.
On Monday, the Pentagon announced that President Donald Trump had approved the execution by firing squad of former Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the man convicted of the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood that left 13 people dead. The announcement came in a post on X from Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell, who said the decision followed a recommendation from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.
“Judgement day for Hasan has finally come,” Parnell wrote.
Hegseth himself weighed in with a single word: “Justice.”
What the Pentagon announced
The details are short and blunt. Trump approved the method, Hegseth recommended it, and the Secretary of the Army will set the time and place. Parnell did not sugarcoat who Hasan was, calling him a “convicted terrorist” and noting that Hasan shouted “Allahu Akbar” while firing on unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009.
For Hasan, the legal road has been long. He was sentenced to death by a military court martial in 2013, convicted of 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder. He has been sitting on military death row at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas ever since, and according to reports he lost his final appeal to overturn the sentence in early 2025. He is one of only four men on the military’s death row.
The massacre that started it all
On November 5, 2009, Hasan, an Army major and psychiatrist, opened fire at a processing center at Fort Hood in Texas where troops were standing in line for immunizations before deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. He killed 12 soldiers and a retired serviceman and wounded 32 others. Among the dead was a pregnant private who pleaded for the life of her unborn baby before she was shot.
Hasan was a US-born citizen of Palestinian descent who, by his own account, had become radicalized. At his court martial he admitted he was the gunman and said the attack was retaliation for US wars in the Muslim world. “There was adequate provocation,” he told the military judge, arguing the deploying soldiers were going to fight what he called an illegal war.
Police shot him at the scene, ending the rampage. Officers later found a second gun, extra ammunition magazines, and a cell phone on him. He represented himself at trial, a decision many legal experts said all but guaranteed a death sentence. They were right: a jury panel of 13 officers unanimously recommended it.
Why a firing squad, and why now
The firing squad choice did not come out of nowhere. The Trump administration recently expanded the list of allowed methods for the gravest federal crimes, adding firing squad, electrocution, and gas asphyxiation alongside lethal injection. The reason given was practical: the drugs used in lethal injections have become increasingly hard to obtain, and the injections themselves have gone wrong often enough to become a national controversy.
That controversy exploded less than a week ago. On September 30, prison staff in Tennessee attempted to execute Christa Pike by lethal injection, and the attempt failed. Pike survived her own execution and has been unconscious on a ventilator ever since, a story we covered in detail. Her lawyers had actually warned ahead of time that executioners might struggle to establish a working intravenous line, and they urged the state to consider an alternative method such as a firing squad.
One legal scholar thinks Pike’s case may have directly influenced the Pentagon’s choice. Columbia Law School professor Bernard Harcourt, who is writing a book about a botched lethal injection in Alabama, told USA Today that part of him suspects “this might be a Tennessee effect.” His reasoning is simple: officials want to stay away from lethal injection right now because the method looks defective.
The key facts of the decision:
- Who approved it: President Donald Trump, on the recommendation of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.
- Who it applies to: Nidal Malik Hasan, convicted of killing 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009.
- Who sets the date: the Secretary of the Army. No date has been announced yet.
- The timeline: Army policy requires the execution to happen within 150 days of presidential approval, but not sooner than 60 days.
- The precedent: the military has not carried out any execution since 1961, when Pvt. John Bennett was hanged. The last military firing squad execution was on January 31, 1945, when Pvt. Eddie Slovik was executed for desertion during World War II.
What happens next
Even with Trump’s signature, do not expect this to happen next week. A military execution is not a simple order, it is the end of a process that has already taken more than a decade, and some legal observers note that a president’s approval is the start of a final phase that can still take considerable time.
Earlier this year, reports indicated the Army had been quietly preparing. In February, officials reportedly circulated a plan called “Operation Resolute Justice” to coordinate with the Federal Bureau of Prisons on carrying out the executions of Hasan and the military’s three other death row inmates. The plan reportedly involves transferring the prisoners to a facility in Indiana. In June, ABC News reported the Army was preparing to resume executions if Trump gave the green light.
Now the green light is on. Hasan will be the first service member executed by the armed forces in 65 years, and the first to die before a military firing squad in more than 80. Whether that date comes in two months or five, and whether the courts allow it without another fight, is what everyone in the legal world will be watching now.
This is a developing story. We will update this article as the Army announces the time and place of the execution.
Sources
Reporting for this article was drawn from Reuters, CNN, and The Times, with additional context from our US News coverage of the week of the Trump $5,000 check debate.
