I know we have a sizable number of posters here on the Dope who are ex-Navy, ex-USAF, ex-Army, etc.
I’m sure you would have disobeyed illegal orders from a US president or commander - but what about your peers? At the time that you served, and a president had ordered the invasion of Greenland, how confident are you that they would have refused? (Not just about Greenland, that’s just one example - you can think of 100 other different scenarios or hypotheticals.)
At what level of illegal order would it have become a blurry area and you and your peers would have really been stuck on the fence and thought, “It’s really hard to tell whether this is an obey-or-disobey situation?”
The 80s, I felt fairly high confidence that illegal orders would be ignored.
When I got to the Ranger, we still had a WWII vet on board. Over 40 years served. He joked his wife was a lightweight and finished with only 30 years. He was our Command Masterchief and went on to be the Fleet Masterchief before retiring finally.
He reminded us somewhere early before moving to our Division berths, that our oath was to the Constitution and not the Captain, an Admiral or the President.
Later, I was given an illegal order to attend a church service and the idiot Jg didn’t understand it was illegal so I went to legal and they backed me up fully.
I’m pretty sure most flag officers and Captains of the time were loyal to the Country and not the POTUS.
In my era (the Reagan years) there would be no debate about illegal orders; they wouldn’t leave the Pentagon. And everybody down the chain would push back if they did somehow get past the big brass.
Nowadays? Beats the shit outta me. We’ll soon see.
When I was serving ('67-'90), the idea of a superior issuing unlawful orders seemed pretty unlikely. It happened in Vietnam, of course, and it would seem that wartime is when there is the most danger of it happening. I mentioned somewhere else on this board that I was given direction once that I considered to be questionable, if not unlawful, and I gently challenged the officer about it, saying that I was “not comfortable with that direction”. He retracted pretty quickly, so obviously he also knew that it was not right.
As to the OP’s question, I’m pretty sure that any NCO would have refused to follow a clearly illegal directive, such as inflicting harm or violating the enlistment oath.
“Any”? I don’t think so. After all, someone clearly did follow the literal textbook example of an illegal order, by shooting shipwreck survivors in the water.
I missed Vietnam, and I served ‘80-‘93. One possible aspect with illegal orders is that there can be a slippery slope of a gray area. I’m glad I missed Vietnam because when you’re deep in the shit, it might not be so easy to see where that line is and when it has been crossed.
I just came back from a month vacation in the Philippines and I saw many rice paddies. I even walked a few as we toured some. That mud and muck can be thick and difficult to walk through. Sometimes it was warm and humid, about 90° - 95°, and I was imagining how it would be trudging through those muddy paddies with all your combat gear on, in that heat and humidity carrying weapons and ammo. And this was December-January when it was relatively cool with little rain. Imagine it being hotter and humider in the summertime.
Under that duress, and when there is a ‘group think’ dynamic in play, and when you’re under fire and your life is threatened, and you’ve maybe been injured and you’ve seen your buddies and friends injured or killed, that stress can push people to their limits.
And when you’re are at your limits, well, ethics might not be first and foremost on your minds. And different people have different limits. Different people have different breaking points.
When you’re surrounded by otherwise good people whose actions might push into that gray area, and when those people have your back and you have theirs, while I’d like to think that I’d be one to yell out No! or Stop! somewhere along that slippery slope, well I’m here to say that I’m very grateful that I’ve never been put in that situation. Not even close.
I’m fortunate that in my years of service, even though I am a veteran of Desert Shield and Desert Storm, I was never in a combat zone. I was never under fire nor did I ever fire my weapon in a hostile scenario.
I served with very good people and we all had high morals, but that will change under the stress of combat.
A challenge we have today is with the concept of “illegal”.
Starting with various counter-terrorism legislation in the 1970s and continuing with the damnable Patriot Act, plus other later erosions, the US has slowly created a legal category of what I’ll call “outlaw without recourse”. A person or group can be declared “evil” at which point they have no rights whatsoever. Under US law they are not enemy combatants entitled to Geneva Convention treatment. They are not criminals subject to conventional court review from Miranda through prosecution and sentencing and …
They are simply declared to be outlaws and once so declared are legally as killable for any reason or no reason as is a wild animal. Who does the declaring? The regime does. By what standards? Whatever standards they want; including none at all.
The US is now an outlaw country ignoring / denying international law. And the US government folks, be they DoD or some flavor of law enforcement, committing what are atrocities morally speaking, are at least arguably fully in compliance with US law as it applies to declared “evil” people and groups.
And yes, this is full-on Fascist. And has been slowly being assembled since the 1970s, but really in earnest from about 2000.
I’m somewhat sympathetic to troops in combat who make bad decisions. Sure, it shouldn’t happen, but as you say, people have limits.
But what’s happening now, and what may happen in the near future, will not be anything like a soldier in combat being pushed beyond their limits and making a bad mistake. When the US decides to invade Greenland, every member of that attacking force that doesn’t immediately lay down their arms and refuse to follow those orders will be making a calm, rational decision to follow an illegal order. They won’t be under fire, they won’t be under stress, they won’t have seen their friends injured or killed. They’ll wake up, man their stations, and open fire on people who have never done them any harm.
It’s time to wake up and understand that these are the stakes. Any current member of the US military has to ask themselves, “Will I open fire on command, regardless of how innocent the people I’m shooting at are?”
I think a lot of people don’t quite understand what an illegal order is and what the military is taught about it. It’s much more micro than macro. They are not expected to decide if the president is following the War Powers Act or if the deployment is against clause whatever in the NATO charter. They are taught to disobey an order to fire on civilians, to not target medical personnel. Things like that. If you have an objection to being deployed to Greenland that’s a personal choice but I doubt you will have any more protections citing illegal orders than those that refused to deploy to Saudi Arabia during Desert Shield.
Here is a pretty decent video explaining what is taught to soldiers about the Law of Land Warfare. It’s not much different than what I was taught in Basic Training in the late 80s or what I was taught when I deployed to Iraq a couple decades later. The video isn’t official and is by no means definitive but it gives a good overview. ETA: it’s 3 years old so it only talks in broad terms and not about anything specific today.
This seems completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. It sounds like you’re trying to pre-emptively make excuses for troops obeying orders to fire on unarmed American civilians.
Seems relevant to me. The question is partly how confident one would have been that one’s peers wouldn’t have followed an illegal order, and Bullitt has a point that various external factors could push that ‘confidence’ one way or the other.
Served in the mid-late 80’s. In the non-wartime situations I was in, I would have had a reasonably high degree of confidence my peers wouldn’t have followed illegal orders. That said, there were certainly a few select psychos I encountered that I’m less confident of (‘lighten up, Francis’)
This is important for people to know. The legality of the deployment is more or less outside anyone’s ability to choose, except for maybe the four-star generals at the Pentagon (the Unified Combatant Commanders) who actually command the combat troops directly under orders from the President/Secretary of Defense (I’ll be damned if I call him the Secretary of War).
Those guys might have some obligation to point out/refuse what they consider illegal deployment orders, but even then I think it’s not “You’re not following the War Powers Act”, but rather “We have no reason to actually nuke ” or “I’m not deploying the active duty troops to occupy Atlanta”.
Nearly unbearable. Not only heat and humidity, but insects in clouds. All I had to carry was a tool pouch; I can’t imagine lugging an M-60 or a mortar tube.
I can imagine that. I’ve been in the field in the Mojave Desert when it’s 120°F, and I actually tolerate that pretty well. It is a dry heat, as the saying goes, and you can preemptively mitigate that by hydrating early and often. But humid air that is heavy and thick really saps you.
All of these factors that stress you will have an impact on your ability to to behave ethically.
Short of flatly violating an act of Congress, the Commander in Chief has the standing authority to order the military to do damn near anything. The real problem is that once upon a time it was understood that some things were “acts of war”, and that ordering them done would have been presumably illegal, as we used to have a clear distinction between a state of peace and a state of war. Now? The CiC is limited only by what Congress would threaten to impeach him for, and politically Trump’s stranglehold on the Republicans forestalls that. So we’re left up a creek.
Realistically, the best any servicemember could so would be to refuse orders on the grounds that they believed them to be illegal; thereby immediately getting their ass busted to the stockade and swiftly court-martialed. More or less, hope that the J.A.G. gives them a damn good lawyer.
Of course people are going to be more likely to make poor decisions when they are under fire and seeing their buddies get killed. What I object to is implying that soldiers deployed to American cities would ever realistically find themselves in that situation. I think this is a crucial point, because if that were actually true, then the Administration would have a reasonable case for sending troops there to engage in artillery battles with Antifa or whatever.
Are there any military, ex-military or civilian members of The Dope that know what military personnel are being taught now about following illegal orders? Please, no “I don’t know about now, but back when I was in the military…” stories.
As far as I can tell the doctrine hasn’t changed. Certainly the UCMJ hasn’t changed. Only Congress can do that. What has changed is that yearly briefings on the Law of Land Warfare were made optional rather than mandatory. That doesn’t mean that military members never get taught it. It means that it came off the list of yearly mandatory briefings. Commanders can still give those briefings if its needed for their mission but it’s not tracked by the Pentagon as mandatory.
Personally I didn’t disagree with them eliminating some of the death by PowerPoint that has become a big time waster in the military. Every time a faceless one star in the Pentagon got a bright idea it eventually became a mandatory briefing that took units away from training their mission. The priorities of what to keep and what to get rid of are up for debate. I think this is training that should have been kept mandatory.
