Nidal Malik Hasan will die by a US Army firing squad. President Donald Trump approved the execution Monday after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recommended it. The Pentagon made the announcement in a short post on X. The words were plain. The method was not.
This is the first military execution in the United States since 1961. It is the first Army firing squad since World War II. The last soldier put to death by the Army was Pvt. John Bennett, hanged at Fort Leavenworth for rape and attempted murder of a child. The last Army firing squad was Pvt. Eddie Slovik, shot in France in 1945 for desertion. Those names sit in footnotes until they do not.
Hasan killed 13 people during a mass shooting at Fort Hood in 2009. He injured 32 others during the same mass shooting. He was an Army psychiatrist at the time. He opened fire at the Soldier Readiness Processing Center as troops prepared to deploy. A military jury convicted him in 2013 of 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder. He was sentenced to death and has been on military death row at Fort Leavenworth ever since.
The legal path was long. The US Army Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the death penalty in 2020. The US Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces did the same in 2023. The Supreme Court denied Hasan's petition in March 2025. That cleared the way for presidential review. In September 2025, Hegseth said he was seeking approval for execution. On Monday, he got it.
Army policy says an execution must happen within 150 days of presidential approval, and no sooner than 60 days. The Secretary of the Army will set the time and place. Those details have not been announced. Further litigation in civilian federal court could still delay things. That is how these endings work. They stretch. They pause. Then they land.
The online temperature was steady. Quiet concern, because the execution follows a long legal process after a violent act that killed 13 people. Some posts focused on the rarity of a firing squad. Others noted this would be the first military execution in more than six decades. A smaller set asked what this means for the four people still on military death row. The numbers did not change. The tone did.
Hasan's case has always been a hinge. It was one of the deadliest non-combat assaults on an American military installation. It forced the Army to confront how a psychiatrist could turn a laser-sighted handgun on unarmed soldiers in a readiness center. It raised questions about radicalization, oversight, and warning signs that were missed or ignored. Those questions did not vanish when the sentence was read in 2013. They sat in the background while appeals moved forward.
The method matters to people even when the outcome does not. Firing squads are rare in the United States. South Carolina carried out three in 2025, the first in the country since 2010. The military has not used one since Slovik. That history makes this feel older than it is. It also makes it feel final in a way that lethal injection does not. You can argue about dignity, speed, or pain. You cannot argue about the weight of a volley.
There is a strange stillness around this news. Not celebration. Not outrage. Just a recognition that a process is finishing. The facts are fixed. Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 people. He injured 32 others. He will be executed by a US Army firing squad if the timeline holds. The room around those facts is quieter than you might expect. Maybe because the story has been running for 17 years. Maybe because the end was always going to look like this.
What happens next is procedural. The Army sets a date. Lawyers file motions. Clocks start and stop. The public watches in short bursts. The families of the dead and wounded live with the long version. They have been living with it since November 5, 2009. The rest of us get headlines and then silence. That is the pattern. It will hold until it does not.
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