The last time the United States military put one of its own in front of a firing squad, Franklin Roosevelt was president and the enemy was still fighting in the Ardennes. That fact alone explains why the Pentagon’s announcement that Nidal Hasan will die the same way carries weight far beyond a single case.
Key Points
- Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell announced that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recommended, and President Trump approved, execution by firing squad for Nidal Hasan, convicted in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting that killed 13 people.
- If carried out, it would be the first U.S. military execution in more than six decades and the first by firing squad since Army Private Eddie Slovik was shot for desertion in January 1945.
- Hasan has sat under a death sentence since 2013; the approval changes the method of execution rather than the underlying conviction or sentence.
- The decision lands amid a broader national reconsideration of execution methods, most visibly Idaho’s 2025 law making firing squad its primary method after years of lethal-injection complications.
- Firing squad has always been a marginal method in American capital punishment history — roughly 1% of executions since the colonial era and under half a percent since 1976.
What the Pentagon Announced
The announcement came through a statement attributed to Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell, who said plainly: “Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has recommended — and President Donald J. Trump has approved — death by U.S. Army firing squad for convicted terrorist Nidal Malik Hasan”. The phrasing is notable for its directness. Rather than a bureaucratic notice buried in a procedural filing, this was framed as a leadership decision, publicly attributed by name to both the defense secretary and the commander-in-chief. Multiple outlets, including CBS News and the Washington Examiner, reported the identical attribution within the same news cycle, indicating the statement was distributed to press broadly rather than leaked selectively.
Hasan, a former Army major, was convicted by court-martial for the November 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, that killed 13 people and wounded more than 30 others — an attack prosecutors and military officials have long characterized as an act of terrorism carried out against fellow soldiers. He has been held under a death sentence since 2013. What changed this week was not his guilt or his sentence, both long settled, but the method by which that sentence will be carried out.
Why Firing Squad, and Why Now
Execution by firing squad has nearly vanished from American practice for a reason: it was never the primary method even when capital punishment was common. A review of American executions from 1608 to 1976 found only 141 shooting executions out of 14,489 total — about 1% — and since the modern death penalty era began in 1976, firing squads account for a mere six of 1,664 executions, roughly 0.4%. Historically, the method has been almost exclusively military, used against soldiers for offenses like desertion or mutiny rather than against civilians. Eddie Slovik’s 1945 execution in France remains the touchstone case cited by historians and reporters alike as the last instance of the U.S. Army carrying out such a sentence.
Its sudden relevance in 2026 traces to a separate but related trend: states struggling to execute lethal-injection protocols that have become legally contested, pharmaceutically unreliable, or operationally botched. Idaho’s legislature responded by making firing squad its primary method of execution, effective July 1, 2025, after years of difficulty securing lethal-injection drugs and following at least one failed injection attempt that drew national attention. Advocates of the method point to research suggesting it has never produced a documented botched execution, in contrast to lethal injection’s track record, and some legal scholars have argued it is the most medically reliable “known and available alternative” courts have recognized. That state-level precedent forms the backdrop against which the Pentagon’s decision on Hasan will inevitably be read, even though the military operates under its own separate justice system and chain of command.
The Legal and Historical Distinction That Matters
It is worth separating two things that are easy to conflate in headline coverage: the conviction and sentence, which were finalized years ago through the military court-martial process, and the method of carrying out that sentence, which is the subject of this week’s announcement. Military capital cases move through a distinct appellate track — the Army Court of Criminal Appeals and the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces — separate from civilian death-penalty litigation. Hasan’s death sentence has already survived years of appeal. The firing-squad approval addresses how, not whether, that sentence proceeds, and it marks the Pentagon returning to a method of execution codified under Army regulation decades before lethal injection became the default across the broader American justice system.
What This Means Going Forward
For the military justice system, the Hasan case reopens a chapter that has sat dormant since the mid-twentieth century. No American service member has been executed by the military since 1961, when a soldier was hanged for the rape and attempted murder of an 11-year-old girl. A firing-squad execution now would not only end that six-decade pause but do so using a method the Army has not employed since the Second World War. That combination — a long-dormant practice applied to an infamous and politically charged case — guarantees the decision will be scrutinized well beyond its immediate legal mechanics, feeding into the national debate over execution methods that Idaho, Utah, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Oklahoma have already reopened through state legislation.
For the broader public, the significance lies less in procedural novelty than in what it signals about where American capital punishment is heading. As lethal injection grows harder to administer reliably, firing squad — once dismissed as a relic — is re-entering serious policy conversation at both the state and now federal military level. Whatever one’s view of capital punishment itself, the Hasan case stands as the clearest marker yet that the method debate has moved from statehouse legislation into the heart of the Defense Department.
Sources:
idahostatesman.com, forms-idoc.idaho.gov, usatoday.com, idahonews.com, nypost.com, deathpenaltyinfo.org, idoc.idaho.gov