The Gist
The Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual says a service member must refuse a clearly illegal order. Its first example is an order to fire on the shipwrecked.
The same manual says a troop in combat can’t be expected to make a refined legal judgment. So the military put legal review upstream, with lawyers at every level of command.
Since February 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired the top uniformed lawyers of the Army and Air Force and called military lawyers “roadblocks.” He censured a senator who said the rule out loud.
On September 2, 2025, a second U.S. strike killed two survivors of a boat the military had already hit.
On Tuesday the House voted 211 to 204 to send eight articles of impeachment to a committee instead of voting on them. The duty to refuse still lands on the most junior person in the room.
I entered boot camp on January 3, 1983.
We had two company commanders. Early on, they taught us about lawful orders. It was serious. We were allowed to talk about it, which told you how serious.
Nobody in that room was sure what it meant. Not really. Not how you would actually do it.
We were being taught to follow orders. That lesson sticks. It is supposed to.
Then we were told there are orders you must refuse.
Most of us settled on the same plan. We hoped it would never come up.
Zero seconds
Here is what no classroom fixes.
When an order comes, you get about zero seconds. No time to weigh it. No time to find a lawyer. You decide and you move, and the habit of obeying is already moving for you.
The way we understood it, if you refuse, the punishment comes first. The sorting out comes later, if it comes. We all believed that, and believing it is enough to make a person walk right past their own judgment.
That is a hard spot for an E-5. It is a hard spot for anybody.
I never received an illegal order.
Don’t get me wrong. There were midnight requisitions for parts we needed. There was cumshaw, and I was very good at it.
But nobody ever told me to do something I’d have to carry for the rest of my life.
That wasn’t only luck. There was a system upstream of me, and it was doing its job.
The Pentagon wrote this down
The Department of Defense has a Law of War Manual. It runs more than 1,200 pages. The Department’s own General Counsel signed the foreword, and the current edition is dated July 2023. It is the Pentagon’s own statement of the law its people fight under.
Section 18.3 says every member of the armed services has a duty to “refuse to comply with clearly illegal orders to commit violations of the law of war.”
Then it gives an example. This is the first one it reaches for:
“For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.”
The footnote cites a 1921 German court judgment against two naval lieutenants in the Llandovery Castle hospital ship case. The court said the officers knew that killing defenseless people in the lifeboats was against the law. They “should, therefore, have refused to obey.”
The manual knows what that asks of a troop. It says subordinates “are not required to screen the orders of superiors for questionable points of legality.” It quotes the military appeals court that upheld Lt. William Calley’s conviction for My Lai: in the stress of combat, a service member “cannot reasonably be expected to make a refined legal judgment.” The same court said there was nothing to guess about at My Lai.
The manual’s advice for a troop with doubts is to ask up the chain and talk to the command’s lawyer “when appropriate.” That works when there is time.
So how is a sailor supposed to trust an order?
Because the system is built so somebody upstream checks first. Section 18.5 says Defense Department policy has required “qualified legal advisers available at all levels of command.” Plans and rules of engagement are supposed to get a legal review before they ever reach the troops.
That is the deal. You follow orders fast because people with time and law degrees go first.
Who went first
On February 21, 2025, Hegseth fired the top uniformed lawyers of the Army and the Air Force and announced he would replace the Navy’s as well. Three days later he told reporters what it was about: “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.” He added that he wanted the best lawyers giving the best advice on “lawful orders.”
Read that again from the E-5’s seat. The roadblock was the point.
Early in his tenure, Hegseth decided to shut down the Pentagon’s program for limiting civilian harm, The New York Times reported on October 1. By the paper’s count, seven people remained from a staff of 40 at its center, and an attempt to reassign those seven was pulled back only after a member of the House Armed Services Committee stepped in. The Times also reported that the admiral running the Iran war told the Senate in May that his own civilian-harm team went from 10 people to one.
That September, at Quantico, he told the generals: “We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement.”
Here is the manual he is responsible for, on the same subject: “Conducting military operations in accordance with the law of war is not fighting with one hand tied behind one’s back.”
September 2
On September 2, 2025, U.S. forces struck a boat in the Caribbean that the administration said was running drugs. Two men lived through the first strike. A second strike killed them. The White House confirmed the second strike.
The Washington Post reported that Hegseth had given a spoken order to kill everyone aboard. Hegseth says he left before the second strike and saw no survivors. The admiral in charge told lawmakers he was given no such order, according to Sen. Tom Cotton, who was in the briefing and defended the strike. The account given to ABC News is that the two men climbed back onto the boat and were judged to be “still in the fight.” Rep. Jim Himes, in the same briefing as Cotton, described two people in clear distress with no way to move.
I can’t tell you what was said in that room. I wasn’t there, and the people who were don’t agree.
Here is what I can tell you. Somebody down that chain was told to fire on two survivors of a boat the military had already hit.
The manual says who counts as shipwrecked: people who need help and are doing nothing hostile. If that is what those two men were, the order is the manual’s own example of a clearly illegal one. If they were still in the fight, it is not. Cotton and Himes walked out of the same briefing with two different answers.
ABC’s source also said a military lawyer was with the admiral through the whole strike.
So what did that lawyer say? And six months after the Secretary fired the top lawyers and talked about roadblocks, how free was any lawyer to say no?
Whoever was at the end of that chain had to trust that somebody upstream got it right.
The man who said it out loud
In November 2025, Sen. Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain, told troops in a video: “You can refuse illegal orders.”
That is Section 18.3 in plain English.
Hegseth sent him a letter of censure and moved to cut his retired rank and pay. In February a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking it and wrote that the Pentagon had “trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms.” The government appealed, and the appeals court heard the case in May. I can’t find a ruling as of today. I wrote about that fight in Foreign and Domestic.
Now think like a 22-year-old. A senator with lawyers and a Senate seat got a censure letter, and the main thing it cited was that video. What do you figure happens to you?
“No quarter”
On March 13, 2026, briefing reporters on the Iran war, Hegseth said: “No quarter, no mercy for our enemies.”
The manual, Section 5.4.7: “It is forbidden to declare that no quarter will be given.” The same section says it is also prohibited “to threaten the adversary with the denial of quarter.”
Kelly asked him at a Senate Armed Services hearing on April 30 to clarify. Hegseth answered, “We fight to win, and we follow the law.” He did not take the phrase back.
In fairness, Marko Milanovic, an international law professor at the University of Reading, read the line as political hyperbole and not as a call to commit war crimes, Newsweek reported. The manual itself says a commander’s speech shouldn’t be read as permission to break the law.
Fine. The troops heard it anyway.
What it does to people
There is a name for the lasting pain that can follow when you do something that breaks your own sense of right. Or fail to stop it. Or watch it. Or just find out it was done. Researchers at the VA call it moral injury.
I served eight years and I am proud of them.
It sickens me to watch what is being done to the people serving now. They are being put where my shipmates and I only ever hoped we wouldn’t be. And the ones who built their lives on the idea that we were the side with rules are watching too.
The accounting
On Monday, Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, forced eight articles of impeachment against Hegseth onto the House floor. Five are about making war without Congress. The others charge him with dismantling the safeguards against civilian deaths, with the boat strikes, and with going after Kelly.
One of the five covers the raid that seized Venezuela’s president on January 3, 2026. I walked into boot camp on January 3, 1983. Forty-three years to the day.
Hegseth calls the impeachment a “political spectacle.”
On Tuesday the House voted 211 to 204 to send the articles to the Judiciary Committee. That kept them from a vote. Nothing requires the committee to act, and this Congress ends in January. NPR’s read: the vote effectively ends the effort. Massie was the only Republican who voted no.
Nobody had to vote on the charges themselves.
Democrats take the House in January. Their leader’s comment after the vote: “It’s just the beginning.”
An impeachment is the accounting. It should have come sooner. It is still owed.
Today is Veterans Day. The question went to a committee instead of to a vote.
But here is what no vote changes. Somewhere tonight a recruit is sitting in a room like the one I sat in 43 years ago, being told there are orders you must refuse, and hoping it never comes up.
That recruit still gets zero seconds.
Somebody upstream is supposed to go first. That was the deal.
Paper Trail
Department of Defense Law of War Manual (June 2015, updated July 2023): Sections 5.4.7, 7.3.1.2, 18.2.1, 18.3, 18.5.
H. Res. 1655, Impeaching Peter Brian Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, for high crimes and misdemeanors (Massie), text as released November 9, 2026.
House Roll Call 317, November 10, 2026: motion to refer H. Res. 1655 to the Judiciary Committee, passed 211 to 204.
Kelly v. Hegseth, Memorandum Opinion, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, February 12, 2026 (Leon, J.).
Fact, allegation, open question: the second strike on September 2 is confirmed. Who ordered what is disputed. ABC News reported that a military lawyer advised the admiral throughout. What that lawyer advised is not public.
This is journalism, not legal advice. Any service member facing an actual order should talk to a military defense counsel, not a news article.
Last verified: November 11, 2026
I use AI as a research and editing assistant, the same way I’d use a good reference book or a sharp editor. Every word published here is reviewed, verified, and approved by me. The perspective, accuracy, and editorial decisions are mine.
Theresa “Tbird” Aldrich, Navy veteran (VAQ-34, 1983-1990), Investigative Journalist, TbirdsQuietFight.com, Founder of HadIt.com | Advisory Board Member, Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute (VHPI).