Britain’s defense secretary criticized Prince Harry on Thursday for “boasting” in his autobiography about how many Taliban fighters he killed while serving in the military in Afghanistan.

In his book “Spare,” the duke of Sussex discloses that he killed 25 people while fighting in the war, where he completed two tours of duty. After serving as a forward air controller from 2007-08, he returned as an Apache helicopter pilot from 2012-13.

“So, my number: Twenty-five,” Harry wrote. “It wasn’t a number that gave me any satisfaction. But neither was it a number that made me feel ashamed. Naturally, I’d have preferred not to have that number on my military CV, on my mind, but by the same token I’d have preferred to live in a world in which there was no Taliban, a world without war.”

Harry wrote that in combat, he didn’t think of the 25 fighters he killed as people. 

“They were chess pieces removed from the board, Bads taken away before they could kill Goods,” he wrote. “I’d been trained to ‘other-ize’ them, trained well. On some level I recognized this learned detachment as problematic. But I also saw it as an unavoidable part of soldiering.”

In an interview Thursday morning with the U.K. radio station LBC, British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said boasting about kill counts “distorts the fact that the army is a team game.”

“It's a team enterprise … and so it's not about who can who can shoot the most or who doesn't shoot the most,” said Wallace, a military veteran himself.

“If you start talking about who did what, we're actually letting down all those other people, because you're not a better person because you did and they didn't.”

But the defense chief also said: "I think every every veteran makes their own choices about what they want to talk about in their lives."

Others, including British military veterans, also previously criticized Harry for revealing his kill count in the book.

In an interview on “Late Night With Stephen Colbert” last month, Harry insisted he was not boasting about how many people he killed and said people who characterize it as such are taking the excerpt out of context — “a dangerous lie,” he said.

“I made a choice to share it because having spent nearly two decades working with veterans all around the world, I think the most important thing is to be honest and be able to give space to others to be able to share their experiences without any shame,” he said. “And my whole goal and my attempt with sharing that detail is to reduce the number of suicides.”

The prince added, “I would say that if I heard anybody else, if I heard anyone boasting about that kind of thing, I would be angry.”

The Taliban responded to the excerpt last month by accusing Harry of committing “war crimes.”

Anas Haqqani, a senior member of the Taliban government and a member of the Haqqani Network, which the U.S. and U.K. consider a terrorist organization, tweeted last month: “Mr. Harry! The ones you killed were not chess pieces, they were humans; they had families who were waiting for their return. Among the killers of Afghans, not many have your decency to reveal their conscience and confess to their war crimes.”