We did as we were told... (Part II: Military Philosophy)

Great Debates
1

In GQ, I started this thread asking a question about dialog in the song “Intro to Reality” from Anthrax. It leads into an anti-nazi-ish song called “Belly of the Beast” which is basically an attack on the “we followed orders” defense.

Now this got me to thinking, it’s easy to sit back and judge what soldiers do with years between us and the events that took place. It’s easy to say “that guy should have known not to do that!” and the military (publicly, at least) pays a lot of lip service to the idea that a soldier is responsible for evaluating his orders and refusing to follow an unjust one.

At the same time, soldiers are trained to follow orders without question or regard for personal safety or anything else. You cannot have a functioning military unit where the members are constantly questioning and evaluating their orders. It leads to either anarchy & chaos, or else to a “corporate” state, where everything is questioned and analyzed into inaction.

So at what point is a soldier responsible for his actions under order? At what point is a soldier justified in rejecting an order? This seems to be an important question because during an action, no footsoldier knows more about the operation than his particular role in it.

In other words, a soldier (suppose he’s a sniper) who refuses to carry out his task (killing his assigned target) on moral grounds (refuses to shoot an old lady in front of her husband), not knowing the big picture (that she is really a covert assassin whose target is the man who appears to be her husband, and is vital to something else), can cost the success of the entire operation and the lives of his fellow soldiers.

Sorry my example scenario is so contrived, but it illustrates the question at hand.

As I’ve never served, I’m particularly interested in what people have to say who have - both officers and enlisted.

So how about it? When is it ok to reject an order? How do you know that you have enough information that you’re qualified to judge the order? Is a soldier really responsible for actions he was ordered to perform, or does the blame fall squarely on the officers? And maybe most importantly, during training are you informed that you are responsible for judging the fitness of your orders and for the consequences of your actions under those orders?

2

Military law states that unlawful orders should not be obeyed. That is a much more concrete concept than “unjust.”

3

“How do you know that you have enough information that you’re qualified to judge the order?”
-You don’t. Expanding on what Padeye said, unlawful orders need not be obeyed, but the decision whether an order was indeed “unlawful” is one that the individual disobeying the order must assume will be decided during his (or her) court martial.

“Is a soldier really responsible for actions he was ordered to perform, or does the blame fall squarely on the officers?”
-In general, enlisted are held accountable only to the extent that they had information on which to base a judgement. For example, an infantry soldier would not be held responsible for lobbing a mortar shell into an unmarked field hospital, given orders to do so by his superior. However, that same soldier is required to disobey an order to “take your squad into that hospital, shoot the wounded and rape all the nurses”.

“And maybe most importantly, during training are you informed that you are responsible for judging the fitness of your orders and for the consequences of your actions under those orders?”
-I can’t speak for the training these days, but in mid-70’s USN recruit training, this was covered only sketchily. We were given the information regarding unlawful orders, and then told we’d better obey whatever orders we were given (the implication being that responsibility goes “up the chain” of command, but shit rolls downhill).

4

I am not military and never have been. However I think that the nazis are not a good example to post in this question, because when we look back at the nazis and we say they should have questioned orders it is because we are of the opinioon that they SHOULD NOT have been an effective fighting unit. Therefore they should have questioned their orders. Not to mention that the front line soldiers didn’t necessarily know about a lot of the atrocities being committed while they were fighting.

As to other militaries, I guess it’s important for everyone to be on the same page as far as their morality and the code that they are fighting for is concerned. My wife was Israeli and therefore in the Military, and from what she tells me everyone is pretty clear on the goal and what they are allowed to do and what is wrong and she has many stories of insubordination that was rewarded when the order was not justified. So for better or worse at least they agree on how things should work. I think in the US military that is hard because our interests are almost purely economic.

Erek

5

I am virtually positive that I have read somewhere in the U.S. Army Troop-Leading Procedures that a good op order gives the subordinates a picture of the operations and intentions of the unit two levels higher than they. I.e. when a company CO is briefing the platoon leaders, he’s supposed to give them a picture of what the whole battalion is doing. So, at least in the U.S. military, the soldiers should not be operating in a vacuum of information about the big picture, and should not use such lack of information as an excuse to commit atrocities.

I remember reading in David Henderson’s Marine Sniper, a biography of Carlos Hathcock, that he was once ordered to kill a Frenchman whom his superiors told him was a spy. He did so. Reflecting afterwards, he realized that, for all he knew, his superiors could have been lying to him and the Frenchman could have been a Simon-pure innocent murdered for political reasons.

My civilian take on things: If your superiors give you an adequate reason to kill and they turn out later to be lying to you, responsibility probably should rest with the superiors only. But if your superiors order you to do something that on the face of it looks flagrantly wrong, you should refuse until you have an adequate explanation; you can’t just shoot the old lady on the assumption that there must be a good reason for it. I don’t think this makes military operations impossible. Ninety percent of all orders a soldier receives are of things he’s drilled and trained to do, and will require no analysis of their legality. “Shoot all villagers on sight,” and “torture the POW” are not orders you receive every day and military discipline will not necessarily break down if soldiers ask the legal basis for such orders.

6

Whose law?

I’m sure that pretty much everything that Nazi (sorry, but hard to avoid) soldiers did was considered lawful by the Reich. Or in WWI, was there a German law that forbade the shooting of hostages during war?

I can’t claim to know the mind of the OP, but it seemed to me that Joe_Cool was angling for a wider discussion than just when are U.S. soldiers in need of questioning/disobeying their orders.

7

But at least he got to kill a Frenchman! (Just kidding. I really have nothing against the French).

More seriously…

What about an order that isn’t unlawful but may nevertheless be unreasonable? For example: In ‘Thin Red Line’, a captain willfully disobeys an order by his battalion commander to lead his company up a heavily fortified hill. The captain belives that the hill is too well defended to be taken by a single company (about 100 soldiers) and that attempting to do so would result in the needless loss of the entire company.

So, what happens in the military if subordinates feel a battle plan is ill-concieved?

8

Ah, but there were the Nuremburg and Tokyo war trials. International law over-rides domestic law.

The Nuremburg defence - “I was only following orders” - infuriated prosecutors into fits of rage. It was held to be an invalid defence.

(This is part of the US government’s problem at the moment with the International War Crimes Tribunal - they saw how the surviving German high command got carved up in trial, and executed)

9

RTF, your interpretation of my post is exactly right on. The whole topic interests me, but I’m interested more in the philosophical generalities than specific legal questions. I suppose my outlook leans towards the American side, but to be honest, what brought the question up in my mind was thinking about Nazi Germany in particular.

Re xenophon’s comment, it’s somewhat of a contradiction to briefly tell a soldier that he’s responsible to reject an unlawful order [sub](determination of which is likely beyond his capabilities, since he’s a soldier, not a lawyer)[/sub], all the while drilling and training him to obey orders no matter what. “you must reject an unlawful order. But you damn well better obey every order I give you!” Yeah, ok.

Your faith in “international law” is touching, but I don’t buy it. If international law carried any real weight of law, then entire would all be imprisoned. International law only affects: [list=1] [li]The losers (Germany post-WWII, but not U.S.A. post-Vietnam. Why?); []the weak (Yugoslavia, Panama, but not China or U.S.S.R. Why?); []Who knows? Seems to be arbitrary (Germany, but not Japan. Why?).[/list=1][/li]
Interesting how unequally the so-called international farce^H^H^H^H^HLaw is applied, isn’t it? It seems to be just a way to get revenge on certain people who we collectively don’t like, most often for hollow political reasons.

10

In the case of the United States, it would be the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which holds that it is unlawful to obey orders that violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

While I’m usually a raving (classic) liberal, I generally agree with Joe_Cool - I really don’t want the U.S. military thinking for itself. That is not a bash on the U.S. military - indeed, it is in accord with the thinking of most of the members of the military that I know. I much prefer the military to be the neutral enforcers of policy formulated by the civilian government leadership.

Sua

11

Sua - I’m with you on the US Military. They’re supposed to be an arm of policy, not the makers of it.

And the individual soldier…well, the front line in any mass endeavor will do best if the decisions that confront them are relatively few and simple. And since in the case of the military, you want them to be able to do what they do under circumstances of great stress, keeping it simple is a necessity.

Joe - I’d like to add Cambodia to your list of regimes inexplicably not on trial for…well, not war crimes exactly, but ‘crimes against humanity’ I believe was the original Nuremberg formulation, as the Holocaust and the war were two distinct matters. But it’s hard for me to see why we’re even bothering with Milosevic if we aren’t trying the surviving leaders of the Pol Pot regime.

I’d prefer to think, on the subject of international law, that it’s still in its infancy, and as a result, enforcement is a hit-or-miss proposition at best. Trying some violators of international norms is better than trying none at all, IMO, but given the way the world works, it’s gonna be a while before there’s any system that’s generally recognized as fair (in the sense of applying to all such violators, regardless of country of origin).

Dave - sure, international law overrides national law, if it should come to a trial. But when the potential for military atrocities is present, the international authorities aren’t: the soldier’s superiors, who may be able to do anything from ruining his future prospects to ending his life, are the only authorities present. Does this not present a dilemma for the soldier who we are morally charging with the obligation to disobey, and how do we expect him (and possibly us, later) to deal with it?

12

It has been a long time since I have been through this exercise. In training, recruits in the Vietnam era army were fairly carefully instructed in the law of war and the obligation to refuse unlawful orders. Clearly it is an almost impossible task to require some 19 year old who is scared half to death to make the sometimes sophisticated decisions that go into deciding whether an order is lawful or not. When a young soldier is told to go paint a building (to use a somewhat silly example) he cannot be expected to make an inquiry into the application of the Federal Anti-Deficiency Act and the local post’s maintained contracts.

What can be done, and was done, was to tell each trainee plainly and simply that you do not, for example, kill prisoners, no matter who tells you to do it. An other thing that was taught was that when there was an order to do a thing which was questionable the first thing the soldier does is to ask for the order to be clarified and once clarified to ask who’s order it is. The standard phrase was “By whose order.” If nothing else, the inquiries made the person giving the order thing about what he was about.

I am not at all sure the Nuremberg Defense is relevant to our inquiry. The Nuremberg Defense was offered up by defendants who were not only pursuing a national policy which was by any standard an abomination and which was known by any reasonable person to be clearly criminal, but who were also the authors of that policy. The post-war war crimes prosecution did not evolve soldiers who did things in the heat of battle that were questionable when examined with calm dispassion.

A soldier in combat can be put in terribly difficult positions. When on patrol deep in enemy controlled territory, what do you do with prisoners? You can’t let them go because they will lead other armed enemies to you. You can’t take them with you because prisoners will slow you down and your life depends on moving quickly. You can’t kill them because that is unlawful even though doing so will provide some little assurance that you might get out of the situation alive.

It seem to me that it is a lot easier to pontificate about unlawful orders than to deal with the realities of war and with a soldiers duty to himself and his comrades.

13

Joe_Cool:

I’m happy for you that you are touched, and recommend that you keep touching.

You’ve got a valid point (except you’ve forgotten that Japanese war time leaders, including General Tojo, were executed for war crimes as a result of the judgments in the Tokyo War Crimes Trials).

International criminal law is a very politicised procedure. If a country refuses to allow a citizen (eg. Arial Sharon) be tried for war crimes, or harbours someone accused of crimes against humanity (eg. Idi Amin in Saudi Arabia), then the sovereignty of that country prevails over the right to justice. If a country is strong enough to resist any calls for war crime trials, then they will not occur, or result in judgments which are unenforceable. This is the result of the over-riding interest in sovereignty, pure and simple.

Anyway, I agree with Spavined Gelding in that this is getting a little off-topic, so I’ll leave it at that. The Gelding makes a point which I think is crucial to this debate:

Being in combat, you are under extreme stress. Mistakes and extraordinary errors of judgment are bound to occur. A soldier with a moral imperative has a shitty lot: trying to keep himself and comrades from being killed, while doing thr right thing, must be impossible in some situations.

14

Patience, RT. The bill to set up the tribunal is before the Cambodian legislature, and should be passed soon. The hold-up has been a dispute between Cambodia and the UN as to whether the tribunal should be a national or international one. The compromise has been a five-person tribunal, three Cambodian and two international, but an international member must vote with the majority for a ruling/verdict to be binding.

Sua

15

I’m from Israel, and I’ve recently started serving in the army, (it’s mandatory, ya know) and I can tell you what they teach us.
There are 3 kinds of orders: Legal, illegal and [blatantly] (I’m translating here) illegal. A soldier must obey both legal and illegal orders, though he can file a complaint on an illegal order. However, a soldier must disobey a blatantly illegal order, otherwise he is as liable as the person giving the order. So if a superior tells you to buy him a coke or babysit his kid that’s an illegal order, but if he tells you to shoot or beat someone without reason, then that’s a blatantly illegal order. Where do you draw the line? The court defines it as an act that is blatantly immoral and unconscientious, “that stings in the eyes and burns in the heart” and that any person, regardless of his knowledge of the law, should know is wrong.

16

What about the Geneva convention(s) - if a country has signed them, surely it has an obligation to teach them to their soldiers ?

FWIW, in her Majesty’s fire-eating Danish army I was taught (and taught others) the basic rules for behavior in combat as regards prisoners, non-combattants, dangerous installations, booby-traps etc. quite extensively, with written tests. But noone tried giving us illegal orders on exercises to test our reactions - the closest was pop-up rifle targets with red crosses (and hefty demerits) attached.

Of course the finer points can be rather finicky to care about in combat, but everybody knew the basics.

As for sharing information, the standard briefing format (situation, mission, execution, signal, supply - there are things I’ll never forget) - has informing the troops as the first priority. And if the mission entails doing something that might appear to be a war crime, it would certainly be part of the briefing to explain why. (If, for instance, the mission is to attack a supply column that’s illegally marked with red crosses.)

S. Norman

17

As a former enlistee (it’s not something I’m proud of but, I feel it relevant here):

Let’s say you’re enlisted; ergo: you’re basically one of the most expendible pieces of equipment around and the side that wins will do what it will with you. I have had my ass chewed for blindly following orders;

PVT Tr8r: Sergeant!
Sgt. Joe Snuffy: Did you do XYZ?
Tr8r: Yes sgt!
Sgt: Why?
Tr8r: I was ordered to, sgt!
Sgt: Did you think that order made any sense.
Tr8r: No sgt!
Sgt: Why did you do it then?
Tr8r: A logical pretext never seemed requesite for the issuance of orders before . . . SERGEANT!
[Pan to PVT Tr8r doing innumerable push-ups]

Alternativly;

Sgt Joe Snuffy: Did you do XYZ?
Tr8r: No, Sgt!
SJS: Why not?!
Tr8r: I thought tha . . .
SJS: The Army doesn’t pay you to think!
[Pan to PVT Tr8r doing innumerable push-ups]

In a situation more dire than barracks maintenace I might be court martialed or just executed.

Conclusion: DON’T ENLIST!!

18

And these people still send me recruiting letters three years after I’ve finished my service. Some people just can’t take suggestions of anatomical impossibilities for an answer.

19

I spent several years on a missile-carrying sub (FBM), lurking around in the colder oceans of the world and keeping the drop on those awful Soviets. S There were occasional debates about whether we would or should launch on the Soviets.

Opinion a) Well, the US would probably only launch in response to an attack so there isn’t anything left at home. Let’s get even!

Opinion b) Well, our half of the world has had it, we shouldn’t take the rest of it out just for revenge.

Those warheads (several hundred) were targeted on not only military targets but cities as well. We could never estimate how many civilians would die in that scenario but obviously it would have been in the tens of millions range from the direct effects and many more from the radiation and loss of civil infrastructure.

OK then assume two things:

a) The US and Soviets launched and the US (for whatever reason) lost.

b) Our boat was captured or surrendered.

Or flip it around; we both launch and the US wins and then we capture a Soviet crew. These are the guys that nuked LA, NY, Chicago, wherever. Literally MILLIONS of grieving and vengeful relatives are demanding “justice.”

FWIW, I suspect that the crew of whichever boat would be tried for “crimes against humanity” and that there would be some justice in it. After all, that bunch had just killed a substantial fraction of the people that died during WW-II.

So, assume you’re in the Missile Control Center and holding the trigger on the launch system when the order comes down. Is it a legal order? And do you obey it?

Regards.

Testy.

20

The order would probably be legal, but I wouldn’t obey it. Never! But then, I’ve been a conscientious objector for a reason…