I’m researching the facts in a play where the main character is a drone pilot. She is given a direct order to assassinate a high-power war enemy overseas (they’ve been following him for months, it’s a high-priority mission) and she refuses.
We know she is court-martialed, but what sentence would she probably get? A few years, decades, life in prison?
Maybe no punishment at all as she could be acquitted if the order was illegal.
Or maybe no punishment as the government doesn’t want it to be known that they were trying to assassinate someone. A court martial can cause publicity even if it’s held in ‘secret’.
Is the drone pilot an officer or enlisted. (The USAF is training enlisted drone pilots right now.) However if the drone is armed, almost certainly an officer. In that case probably just kicked out of the service with a less than honorable discharge or a reduction in grade or both. I doubt that there would be any hard time.
She’s a major and I think we are too assume the order is legal.
Well I was enlisted but generally there are varying degrees of punishment. If you are given Non-Judicial Punishment it is called an Article 15 and there are two types: a company grade which is relatively minor and a field grade which has more severe penalties and will always appear on your ERB, enlisted records brief or in this case an ORB, Officer Records Brief. If you want to fight the article you can take it to court martial, or if what you did is really bad they’ll just take you straight to court martial.
You can look up all these charges and penalties on google and it will tell you possible punishments. Officers tend to have a lot more rights under UCMJ than enlisted personnel, I think there is a greater burden of proof, and it is harder to take away their rank. You could even make it a plot point like they were offered a field grade article 15 and they decided to fight it because it would mean the end of their career as an officer and they took it to Court Martial.
Apologies for questioning the hypothetical…but wouldn’t this come up early in the officer’s posting? Wouldn’t the officer, at some point before the mission assignment, have warned his superior? “Don’t ask me to perform an assassination, because I can’t do that.” It seems like only bad faith could cause this to pop up as a surprise to anyone.
Maybe the officer was keeping mum, hoping the situation would not arise? This seems woefully incautious. Does this sort of thing come about in real life?
(I can also imagine that the officer may have had a sudden change of heart, maybe just converted to a new religion, etc. But, again, shouldn’t he be upfront with his superior and avoid the problem proactively?)
Assuming US military and thus the UCMJ:
There are different kinds of courts martial - summary, special, and general (in order of severity of punishments possible). General seems to be what you are thinking of based on implied seriousness.
In general, from the Manual for Courts-Martial (MCM) 2012
There’s some differences based on rank for types of court martial and punishments. Since she’s a Major you might want to check Chapter 10 (Sentencing) of MCM for those limits if detail matters that much.
This sounds more like an Article 90 violation (since the protagonist is an officer and thus the superior in question is a commissioned officer) not an Article 92 offense. From Article 90 this is potentially a capital offense:
So a conviction would get them somewhere between the minimum (no punishment) and the maximum (death penalty/life imprisonment) depending on mitigating factors presented to the court. The death penalty (which hasn’t been enforced for anything in a long time) takes the entire court agreeing. 3/4 of the court must vote in support of life imprisonment or confinement greater than 10 years. Any lower punishment requires 2/3 of the court to agree (cite)
I wouldn’t be so quick to throw away her questioning whether it was a lawful order as a defense. Your protagonist is a field grade officer who’s almost certainly had to at least think about performing this portion of her duties if she hasn’t actually done it before. She’d have had years of experience dealing with UCMJ and exercising her duties under the laws of land warfare. She’s likely completed her service obligation and thus would have had the option to resign her commission and get out if there was a point where she changed her mind. Why disobey this order?
The play (Grounded, I recommend it if you’re interested in theatre and the military) is all about trauma with drone pilots, so she’s done assassinations before. Her psyche devolves throughout the show and she disobeys this particular order because a young girl is also in range. She has a psyche break where she thinks the little girl is her own daughter.
She could plead insanity but I understand it’s tough to get acquitted on that basis in the military. Drone piloting is something new though, there’s been some headlines about the stress of the job recently, maybe she’d have a chance. Maybe avoiding killing a young girl is grounds to disobey the order. Kind of hard to see tough sentencing for those circumstances but I don’t know what a light sentence would be in the military.
Assassination is not legal according to Executive Order 11905 which has been reaffirmed by every president since Gerald Ford. As such no assassination order from any military authority short of the president himself would be legal and she would be well within her rights to refuse the order.
Does the OP describe an assassination order?
What about the drone strikes that exist in real life. Are they also illegal?
The OP called it an assassination so I took that to mean that it is an assassination. The jury is still out on the legality of drone strikes for targeted killings of terrorist leaders although ostensibly their use is a extension of the ability of soldiers to kill enemy combatants on the battlefield.
This takes me back to 1945 and the Nuremberg trials. The so-called “Nuremberg Defense” in which using the defense posture of just “obeying a superior’s orders” was no longer considered valid to escape punishment for your actions during war that are then considered war crimes.
I am wondering if this is a valid defense to be used for NOT obeying a superior’s orders, being that the order in and of itself constitutes what might be considered a “war crime”.
Is there any doubt that if some weird-ass Islamic group conquers the United States, that drone manipulators would be charged with war crimes?
The winner not only writes the history books but also is allowed to name the new Hitlers.
Could the Major be accused of cowardice in the face of the enemy? That means a general court martial with possibly the death penalty.
If she had a psychological break, it is not likely she would face any punishment, but would instead see a behavioral health specialist.
Something tells me that “Because you never know who will prevail, I shall conduct myself in a way the enemy would find fully acceptable” may not be the optimum creed for a military officer.
Every civilized nation in the world recognizes that illegal orders should not be obeyed, and that an order to commit a war crime is always an illegal order. The trick is just in establishing what orders are legal and what constitutes a war crime.
My limited experience suggests that she would not be charged with anything. The whole situation would be far too sensitive to be exposed to public examination, and the objective of anything that happened to her afterward would be to stop her from publicising it.
My father was a major in the British Army and for a while was CO of a small unit. A Lieutenant was in trouble for something not straightforward and found himself posted somewhere like Belize. I have no idea what he did but it happened very fast.
Ii the OP’s situation, it might even be possible that she would be promoted to a desk job in supplies or the Pentagon.
In a scenario like that in the OP the Rules of Engagement would be published and well known before a mission. If ordered to go against the RoE it would be an illegal order. If the major thought the RoE was against the Law of Land Warefare the time to bring that up is before the mission.
You may want to watch the recent film “Eye in the Sky” with Helen Mirren.
Mild spoilers follow…
This is a movie that also deals with the moral questions surrounding drone strikes, questioning orders and “collateral” damage. One of the plot points also involves military drone pilots questioning their orders due to a young girl being in the vicinity of the proposed strike.
You may want to watch it just to ensure that your story doesn’t feel like a retelling.
One criticism enlisted have about officers is that they seem to get away with more. An offense that would get an elisted soldier reduced in rank with an Article 15 does not with an officer. Only a Court Martial can take rank from an officer (won’t go into retirement boards here). However, there is something called a GOMOR. General Officer Memorandum of Reprimand. A letter of reprimand instantly destroys s career. That officer will never be promoted or get choice career opportunities. From my experience I would think if it wasn’t handled as a medical issue there would probably be a GOMOR and shuffled off to be head paper clip counter.