Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan will die by firing squad on Dec. 3 after President Trump signed off, the first U.S. military execution since 1961.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell announced the schedule on Monday, saying President Donald Trump had approved use of the firing squad for the man who murdered 13 people on the Texas base in 2009. The execution is set for 1 p.m. at Fort Hood itself, the same ground where the rampage unfolded.
Just the News reported that the date tracks an Army memo first flagged by The Hill, locking in what will be the U.S. military’s first execution in more than six decades. For families of the dead, the calendar finally names a day.
Hasan’s case has dragged for years after a 2013 death sentence. Now the chain of command has moved. That decisive posture mirrors other recent White House follow-through, including coverage of how Trump approved the Army firing squad for Fort Hood killer Nidal Hasan as the date locked in.
Thirteen people died in the 2009 attack. Twelve were service members. One was a civilian. Hasan carried out the killings on the Fort Hood base in Texas and later said he did it over U.S. military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The method was not left to chance. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recommended a firing squad. President Trump approved it.
Parnell put the moment in plain terms after the decision landed.
In a post cited by the New York Post, the Pentagon spokesman wrote:
"Judgement day for Hasan has finally come."
That line lands because the victims never got a second chance. Hasan did, through trial, sentencing, and the long stretch that followed. The military justice system convicted him and imposed death. The executive branch has now cleared the final step.
Readers tracking Trump’s other hard calls have seen the same pattern of signing off and moving ahead, from energy directives to cost-of-living fights such as the push detailed when Trump signed an order on tax-free red dye diesel for drivers. Accountability is the through-line.
The last U.S. military execution came in 1961. Private John Bennett was hanged at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for the rape and attempted murder of a child. Hasan’s case breaks that long silence, and does it by firing squad at the base he attacked.
Place matters. Fort Hood is not an abstract courtroom. It is where 13 people were murdered. Carrying out the sentence there ties the punishment to the crime scene the Army already knows too well.
Parnell’s announcement also underscored who authorized the method. Trump’s approval closed the remaining operational question after Hegseth’s recommendation. When the White House sets a course, it has shown it intends to hold it, a theme also visible in coverage of how the White House clarified Trump’s position on taxpayer-funded ads in a separate spending dispute.
No court-martial docket numbers or full appeals timeline appear in the latest public readout. What is on the record is simpler: a date, a method, a base, and a president’s sign-off.
Hasan was an Army psychiatrist when he opened fire. The death toll, 12 troops and one civilian, still defines the worst insider attack many soldiers of that era remember. He framed the slaughter as payback for American operations overseas. The military framed it as mass murder of his own.
A death sentence in 2013 should have ended the story. Instead, the country waited. Scheduling Dec. 3 ends the wait. It also tests whether military capital punishment remains a real tool or a paper penalty.
Policy fights elsewhere show the same preference for clear action over endless process, including debates captured when Trump weighed a federal gas tax suspension to ease costs at the pump. Different issue. Same instinct: decide, then do.
For the ranks who lost friends and colleagues at Fort Hood, the firing squad is not theater. It is the sentence the court-martial already handed down, now matched with a clock.
When a soldier murders his own on a U.S. base, justice delayed still has to arrive, and on Dec. 3, it finally will.