I want to add lawyers for the DHS who advocated in immigration court for the removal of asylum seekers without due process, or who have enabled their removal by asking that the proceedings be dismissed, or who have advocated for their "pretermission" removal to third party countries (like Uganda), to this list.
The thing is that it has been obvious for a very long time now that the US military was going to be ordered to do evil things like this – and as you have said, when we say "evil", we don't mean by our standards as left-wingers, but by *their* standards as people who sincerely believe that they are serving something greater than themselves.
It was obvious on 6 November 2024, when Trump was confirmed as the winner of the election. It was a very real possibility for months prior to then. It has continued to be obvious since then, and only more so as time has worn on, and more such evil things have, in actual fact, been ordered and carried out. A whole bunch of soldiers and their families seem to have only just become aware of their circumstances and seem to expect us to play along with the canard that it was only reasonable for them to do so now.
No. This has not been a matter of reading the signs; this has been a matter of reading the writing on the wall, a wall so big and adorned in its writing so clearly that the message is legible from any distance and angle. There has been ample time and ample evidence that US soldiers were going to be made into instruments of evil even by its own standards.
Even if we accept the argument that, in the minds of these soldiers, it's incompetence and not active malice that has driven this gross negligence, that would not be good enough. At a certain point, incompetence becomes its own form of malice, and in any event that degree of incompetence renders you unfit to be a soldier; unfit to be a professional; unfit to hold a position of trust; unfit to wield any kind of power.
Do you understand that you can’t just quit when you serve? It’s not a civilian job where you can say “See ya!” and walk out the door. You have an enlistment contract you can fulfill … or you can go to jail.
Also, have you considered that these troops have stable jobs, housing, and schools for their families? Free health care, discounted grocery stores, a great retirement deal. But you’re asking them to swap everything keeping them out of poverty for a bad job market, unaffordable housing, and no healthcare.
Yes, this administration is horrendous. Yes, they are making horrible decisions and putting our troops in bad situations. But the answer is to change the horrible civilian leadership, not ask the troops to sacrifice even more.
I served so I know what I’m talking about. Nothing for the military is as easy as you’ve made it seem here. They are in a hard spot.
They are. I don't envy them. At this point, though, the President and Secretary of Defense have launched at least three different operations that are clearly illegal, I would say even ludicrously so. Everybody involved is in violation of their oath to uphold the US Constitution, even if we discount the moral aspects of bombing schoolchildren and the (many, many) violations of the laws of armed conflict.
Sure. And then there’s the second part of their oath: “I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me.” Violate that and hello, Leavenworth.
Officers have more play on this one (because their oath does not have those lines) but enlisted folks — the most vulnerable population, the least compensated, and the largest percentage of the armed forces by far (82%) — are stuck.
So it’s easy to sit in our civilian lives and tell the military what they should do. But maybe doing that is a whole lot harder.
"It might be cool to be in the military and you might love the work and you might feel a strong bond of brotherhood with those you work with but there is just no way to avoid the fact that you are there to follow orders and the person giving the orders now is bad and the result will be that you will do bad things, and that will be your responsibility, your fault, and your legacy. Your life is worth more than that. You are not a bad person. You do not want to be a mere tool of a villain. When the boss is going to drag your soul to hell with his, it is time to do something else." That could have been said for the over 300 military interventions America has made since 1945. In 1953 Eisenhower's coup of a democratically elected government in Iran and installed the Shaw fucked up Iran for good! After THAT came the Ayatollahs.
Somehow how the "we need good people to stay in the military in order to prevent the bad things from happening" theory has so far failed to prevent any bad things from happening. I'm sure if we keep waiting we'll get there though.
Would soldiers marching in formation with all the most intimidating weaponry, right through DC on Trump's birthday last year not have been a bad thing? That was prevented (remember the squeaky tank?) by people who stayed.
Would cheering and applause at Kegbreath's assembly of all the generals and admirals not have been a bad thing? That didn't happen either.
Would National Guardsmen eager to break heads when ordered into the cities where the people were protesting against ICE not have been a bad thing? Also a thing that didn't happen.
Seriously, take a minute to think about how different the country and the world would look right now if everyone shared your belief that resignation is the only moral option, and the only people still in the military were those who have no regard for morals. The country we have right now may be incredibly ugly, but I would like to raise a very real possibility that the country you're suggesting a move towards would be even uglier.
Trump is simply a man unfit to be commander and chief of the armed forces, but IMO, military employees have had a bad boss for the last 50 years or more. Every president in my lifetime, it could be argued, has committed war crimes. Has bombed sovereign nations, murdered civilians, whether its via drones, missiles, psyops units, or “simple” bombings. The past administrations have convinced us that somehow the US only engaged in military conflicts, not war, and if called a war its “justifiable”. The advent of drones has made warfare simply a video game. It’s never really been a Dept of Defense, it has in fact always been the Dept of War. We wage war against much weaker nations who don’t cooperate with our hegemonic neo-liberal economics. You sign on with the US military you sign on with the unofficial(?) world’s police force. Force is the operative word. It’s one thing to join the military for ideals worth fighting for, the inherent basic rights for people everywhere, ( I think the majority of enlistments are people who do believe in such ideals), but its another to work for a boss(es) who in reality believes in no such thing.
In my daily life I am surrounded by veterans. From all branches of the military. They joined for all the reasons you wrote about. A few saw extreme action. Most did not. Most were clerks, mechanics, logistics grunts. Most liked their immediate bosses, who were competent understanding, and instructional.
To tell these men and women to quit because the temporary CEO is a crazy, no good, psychopath. Does them a disservice. Have you looked at the current job market? Their options are few.
The moral questions of war do not feed families. Or provide a well defined training ladder to a better job. Employment insecurity is everywhere. To ask these young folks to bear the brunt of moral decisions they neither made nor agree with. Is to expose your privilege, and invalidate their struggle.
Unclear to me why we should believe that it is justified to kill the soldiers in Iran who joined their military for identical reasons, yet it is unjustified and tragic for the soldiers of other nations to kill our soldiers who are supporting the military effort to attack them.
I would argue that true concern for the lives of these people serving as soldiers is to urge them not to be involved in an enterprise that might justify either them or their peers in a foreign country killing or being killed. Crime is a way that people with few options support themselves-- not different from the reality of the way many people use the military you describe-- but rather than advocating for people to pursue crime I think we should work on getting them better life opportunities.
Why the strong link between justification and tragedy. The death of anyone is tragic, regardless of which country's uniform they wear, or if they wear none at all.
With that out of the way, any troops I've spoken to about the matter, view their own death in combat as being as justified. I remember my gf asking a friend of mine who used to be a machine gunner how he bore the moral weight of killing his enemies. His answer was basically to assert that all of the troops on the battlefield, including himself, have agreed to accept the risk of death by going out there; roughly speaking "he signed up to die, the same as I did".
More briefly; regardless of whose side they're fighting on, the killing of troops is always a tragedy, and yet it's always justified by the simple fact that they're troops.
And yes, we _should_ work on getting our troops better life opportunities. Like how about allowing them to continue to serve in a military that isn't run by a demented villain? Pushing the responsibility onto the troops to quit is an abdication of our responsibility as citizens to keep our government moral.
(And in case you're curious, I'm not in the military, and I never have been. My sister however, is in the military and has only one contract renewal remaining before she qualifies for retirement. If you want to give her your 401(k) to replace the retirement that she'd be giving up by not signing up one last time, I'm sure that she'd gladly take that off-ramp. Otherwise, let's remember that our troops have a standing order to remain visibly apolitical. It's up to us civilians to do the work that they're forbidden from doing; to put them back under the command of someone who deserves them.)
The options might be few, but if one of those is not to drop bombs on elementary school kids, the choice for any morally sentient human being should be a no brainer.
I'd suggest a very different approach to leaving the military: the most honorable thing that can happen to any of our troops today is to be court-martialled for refusing an immoral order. The appropriate exit strategy isn't an orderly resignation, it's a chaotic mess of disobedience and litigation. Don't make things easy for the Villain-in-Chief by leaving with him an entirely obedient (if smaller) military; leave him with a military where he can't count on an unlawful order being passed down the chain of command to the troops who would be tasked with executing it.
I remember reading that the planes that performed the illegal double-tap strikes on boats off of Venezuela; those planes had also been illegally painted to look like civilian aircraft. I'd be willing to bet with generous odds that the role of those paint jobs wasn't actually disguise; rather the role of that paint job was to identify which pilots and plane crews on the aircraft carriers were willing to commit war crimes, so they could be tasked with the double-tap strikes.
As long as there's a squardon worth of pilots who are willing to commit war crimes, those war crimes can be ordered. However it's a hell of a lot more expensive to get that squadron's worth of pilots downrange if you don't know who they are beforehand and have to send an entire wing. Mass resignations give the easier option to the goon squad convened in the White House.
As shitty as it is to land on the job market after getting fired rather than quitting; the difference isn't as much as the difference between maybe being able to ride out a bad CEO while throwing sand in the gears, and quitting voluntarily.
I'm going to put forward the idea that when you have an evil boss, making that boss fire you for your foot-dragging and lack of alignment with their vision, is no less moral a course of action than an orderly resignation --- and you might get lucky and outlast the boss. Sure it's a discourteous course of action, but we don't owe courtesy to evil people in power.
* not a moral excuse even if it WAS the current state of the United States.
* a horrible situation, if it were true. A country that has citizens so poor their only choice is to sign up for to the army to fight in some distant land and kill and die is, to my mind, a dystopia. Such a country would not be worth fighting for; better to stay home and struggle against your oppressors!
* a dystopia that could be made better, if they cared, by EXACTLY the people who are sending the poor out to kill.
I say this as a former soldier of the US Army who thankfully was never required to kill anybody.
It was easy when I was in the Air Force. Yes, there was an unpopular war in Vietnam, but being apolitical at the time, I didn’t think about any of what Hamilton just brought up. But I also didn’t have such a clown show of leadership at the top that today’s soldiers have. I hope these well intended troopers can see more beyond themselves than I could and muster up the gall to to the right thing when commanded to do the opposite.
I hear where you’re coming from, and while I agree that the current administration has put our military in an incredibly difficult and ethically messy position, telling everyone to just "quit" feels pretty out of touch with reality. It’s easy to preach about moral purity from a comfortable, "spoon-fed" life, but you’re ignoring the fact that a military contract isn't like a regular tech job; you can’t just hand in a two-week notice. Walking away is desertion and leads to prison. Beyond the legal stuff, there’s a massive privilege in telling the people who protect us to just go home. If every soldier with a conscience actually listened to you and quit, the only people left carrying the weapons would be the ones who don't care about ethics, which is a terrifying thought. These soldiers didn’t start the war, and they aren’t the ones making the policy, but they have a sworn oath to the country and the Constitution that goes way deeper than whoever happens to be in the White House. At the end of the day, we rely on them to keep things from falling apart, and blaming the person in uniform for the "bad boss" at the top feels like a total misunderstanding of what service and sacrifice actually look like.
Peter Z. As a Vietnam Vet and former anti-war activist, my opinion is that HN's arguments about how soldiers should quit asap because they have a "bad boss" is not persuasive. We did not have such Trumpian "bad bosses" during the Vietnam War but we committed war crimes just the same. The GI movement then advised soldiers/sailors/marines on how to become conscientious objectors based on the nature of that war and what they were being asked to do. It then became their decision based on their circumstances. That's the issue not the badness of Trump or his sidekicks. Would someone like to reestablish a new GI movement? Si Se Puede!
I want to add lawyers for the DHS who advocated in immigration court for the removal of asylum seekers without due process, or who have enabled their removal by asking that the proceedings be dismissed, or who have advocated for their "pretermission" removal to third party countries (like Uganda), to this list.
The thing is that it has been obvious for a very long time now that the US military was going to be ordered to do evil things like this – and as you have said, when we say "evil", we don't mean by our standards as left-wingers, but by *their* standards as people who sincerely believe that they are serving something greater than themselves.
It was obvious on 6 November 2024, when Trump was confirmed as the winner of the election. It was a very real possibility for months prior to then. It has continued to be obvious since then, and only more so as time has worn on, and more such evil things have, in actual fact, been ordered and carried out. A whole bunch of soldiers and their families seem to have only just become aware of their circumstances and seem to expect us to play along with the canard that it was only reasonable for them to do so now.
No. This has not been a matter of reading the signs; this has been a matter of reading the writing on the wall, a wall so big and adorned in its writing so clearly that the message is legible from any distance and angle. There has been ample time and ample evidence that US soldiers were going to be made into instruments of evil even by its own standards.
Even if we accept the argument that, in the minds of these soldiers, it's incompetence and not active malice that has driven this gross negligence, that would not be good enough. At a certain point, incompetence becomes its own form of malice, and in any event that degree of incompetence renders you unfit to be a soldier; unfit to be a professional; unfit to hold a position of trust; unfit to wield any kind of power.
Do you understand that you can’t just quit when you serve? It’s not a civilian job where you can say “See ya!” and walk out the door. You have an enlistment contract you can fulfill … or you can go to jail.
Also, have you considered that these troops have stable jobs, housing, and schools for their families? Free health care, discounted grocery stores, a great retirement deal. But you’re asking them to swap everything keeping them out of poverty for a bad job market, unaffordable housing, and no healthcare.
Yes, this administration is horrendous. Yes, they are making horrible decisions and putting our troops in bad situations. But the answer is to change the horrible civilian leadership, not ask the troops to sacrifice even more.
I served so I know what I’m talking about. Nothing for the military is as easy as you’ve made it seem here. They are in a hard spot.
They are. I don't envy them. At this point, though, the President and Secretary of Defense have launched at least three different operations that are clearly illegal, I would say even ludicrously so. Everybody involved is in violation of their oath to uphold the US Constitution, even if we discount the moral aspects of bombing schoolchildren and the (many, many) violations of the laws of armed conflict.
Sure. And then there’s the second part of their oath: “I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me.” Violate that and hello, Leavenworth.
Officers have more play on this one (because their oath does not have those lines) but enlisted folks — the most vulnerable population, the least compensated, and the largest percentage of the armed forces by far (82%) — are stuck.
So it’s easy to sit in our civilian lives and tell the military what they should do. But maybe doing that is a whole lot harder.
"It might be cool to be in the military and you might love the work and you might feel a strong bond of brotherhood with those you work with but there is just no way to avoid the fact that you are there to follow orders and the person giving the orders now is bad and the result will be that you will do bad things, and that will be your responsibility, your fault, and your legacy. Your life is worth more than that. You are not a bad person. You do not want to be a mere tool of a villain. When the boss is going to drag your soul to hell with his, it is time to do something else." That could have been said for the over 300 military interventions America has made since 1945. In 1953 Eisenhower's coup of a democratically elected government in Iran and installed the Shaw fucked up Iran for good! After THAT came the Ayatollahs.
Still waiting for the good soldiers to stand up, aren't we?
Somehow how the "we need good people to stay in the military in order to prevent the bad things from happening" theory has so far failed to prevent any bad things from happening. I'm sure if we keep waiting we'll get there though.
Would soldiers marching in formation with all the most intimidating weaponry, right through DC on Trump's birthday last year not have been a bad thing? That was prevented (remember the squeaky tank?) by people who stayed.
Would cheering and applause at Kegbreath's assembly of all the generals and admirals not have been a bad thing? That didn't happen either.
Would National Guardsmen eager to break heads when ordered into the cities where the people were protesting against ICE not have been a bad thing? Also a thing that didn't happen.
Seriously, take a minute to think about how different the country and the world would look right now if everyone shared your belief that resignation is the only moral option, and the only people still in the military were those who have no regard for morals. The country we have right now may be incredibly ugly, but I would like to raise a very real possibility that the country you're suggesting a move towards would be even uglier.
We don't really know this, do we? If bad things are being prevented, it's not getting into the news.
I think the OP is trying to say there are no good soldiers
Trump is simply a man unfit to be commander and chief of the armed forces, but IMO, military employees have had a bad boss for the last 50 years or more. Every president in my lifetime, it could be argued, has committed war crimes. Has bombed sovereign nations, murdered civilians, whether its via drones, missiles, psyops units, or “simple” bombings. The past administrations have convinced us that somehow the US only engaged in military conflicts, not war, and if called a war its “justifiable”. The advent of drones has made warfare simply a video game. It’s never really been a Dept of Defense, it has in fact always been the Dept of War. We wage war against much weaker nations who don’t cooperate with our hegemonic neo-liberal economics. You sign on with the US military you sign on with the unofficial(?) world’s police force. Force is the operative word. It’s one thing to join the military for ideals worth fighting for, the inherent basic rights for people everywhere, ( I think the majority of enlistments are people who do believe in such ideals), but its another to work for a boss(es) who in reality believes in no such thing.
In my daily life I am surrounded by veterans. From all branches of the military. They joined for all the reasons you wrote about. A few saw extreme action. Most did not. Most were clerks, mechanics, logistics grunts. Most liked their immediate bosses, who were competent understanding, and instructional.
To tell these men and women to quit because the temporary CEO is a crazy, no good, psychopath. Does them a disservice. Have you looked at the current job market? Their options are few.
The moral questions of war do not feed families. Or provide a well defined training ladder to a better job. Employment insecurity is everywhere. To ask these young folks to bear the brunt of moral decisions they neither made nor agree with. Is to expose your privilege, and invalidate their struggle.
Unclear to me why we should believe that it is justified to kill the soldiers in Iran who joined their military for identical reasons, yet it is unjustified and tragic for the soldiers of other nations to kill our soldiers who are supporting the military effort to attack them.
I would argue that true concern for the lives of these people serving as soldiers is to urge them not to be involved in an enterprise that might justify either them or their peers in a foreign country killing or being killed. Crime is a way that people with few options support themselves-- not different from the reality of the way many people use the military you describe-- but rather than advocating for people to pursue crime I think we should work on getting them better life opportunities.
Why the strong link between justification and tragedy. The death of anyone is tragic, regardless of which country's uniform they wear, or if they wear none at all.
With that out of the way, any troops I've spoken to about the matter, view their own death in combat as being as justified. I remember my gf asking a friend of mine who used to be a machine gunner how he bore the moral weight of killing his enemies. His answer was basically to assert that all of the troops on the battlefield, including himself, have agreed to accept the risk of death by going out there; roughly speaking "he signed up to die, the same as I did".
More briefly; regardless of whose side they're fighting on, the killing of troops is always a tragedy, and yet it's always justified by the simple fact that they're troops.
And yes, we _should_ work on getting our troops better life opportunities. Like how about allowing them to continue to serve in a military that isn't run by a demented villain? Pushing the responsibility onto the troops to quit is an abdication of our responsibility as citizens to keep our government moral.
(And in case you're curious, I'm not in the military, and I never have been. My sister however, is in the military and has only one contract renewal remaining before she qualifies for retirement. If you want to give her your 401(k) to replace the retirement that she'd be giving up by not signing up one last time, I'm sure that she'd gladly take that off-ramp. Otherwise, let's remember that our troops have a standing order to remain visibly apolitical. It's up to us civilians to do the work that they're forbidden from doing; to put them back under the command of someone who deserves them.)
The options might be few, but if one of those is not to drop bombs on elementary school kids, the choice for any morally sentient human being should be a no brainer.
I'd suggest a very different approach to leaving the military: the most honorable thing that can happen to any of our troops today is to be court-martialled for refusing an immoral order. The appropriate exit strategy isn't an orderly resignation, it's a chaotic mess of disobedience and litigation. Don't make things easy for the Villain-in-Chief by leaving with him an entirely obedient (if smaller) military; leave him with a military where he can't count on an unlawful order being passed down the chain of command to the troops who would be tasked with executing it.
I remember reading that the planes that performed the illegal double-tap strikes on boats off of Venezuela; those planes had also been illegally painted to look like civilian aircraft. I'd be willing to bet with generous odds that the role of those paint jobs wasn't actually disguise; rather the role of that paint job was to identify which pilots and plane crews on the aircraft carriers were willing to commit war crimes, so they could be tasked with the double-tap strikes.
As long as there's a squardon worth of pilots who are willing to commit war crimes, those war crimes can be ordered. However it's a hell of a lot more expensive to get that squadron's worth of pilots downrange if you don't know who they are beforehand and have to send an entire wing. Mass resignations give the easier option to the goon squad convened in the White House.
As shitty as it is to land on the job market after getting fired rather than quitting; the difference isn't as much as the difference between maybe being able to ride out a bad CEO while throwing sand in the gears, and quitting voluntarily.
I'm going to put forward the idea that when you have an evil boss, making that boss fire you for your foot-dragging and lack of alignment with their vision, is no less moral a course of action than an orderly resignation --- and you might get lucky and outlast the boss. Sure it's a discourteous course of action, but we don't owe courtesy to evil people in power.
"I really had no other option but to kill people in another country to get a paycheck" is:
* not an accurate description of the current state of the United States. I point to things like this: https://www.hoover.org/research/military-recruiting-shortfalls-recurring-challenge
* not a moral excuse even if it WAS the current state of the United States.
* a horrible situation, if it were true. A country that has citizens so poor their only choice is to sign up for to the army to fight in some distant land and kill and die is, to my mind, a dystopia. Such a country would not be worth fighting for; better to stay home and struggle against your oppressors!
* a dystopia that could be made better, if they cared, by EXACTLY the people who are sending the poor out to kill.
I say this as a former soldier of the US Army who thankfully was never required to kill anybody.
It was easy when I was in the Air Force. Yes, there was an unpopular war in Vietnam, but being apolitical at the time, I didn’t think about any of what Hamilton just brought up. But I also didn’t have such a clown show of leadership at the top that today’s soldiers have. I hope these well intended troopers can see more beyond themselves than I could and muster up the gall to to the right thing when commanded to do the opposite.
Ron Kovic himself could've written that.
"At the end of the day we all for work for the same man, and he sells Marlboros." -Pete Townsend.
I hear where you’re coming from, and while I agree that the current administration has put our military in an incredibly difficult and ethically messy position, telling everyone to just "quit" feels pretty out of touch with reality. It’s easy to preach about moral purity from a comfortable, "spoon-fed" life, but you’re ignoring the fact that a military contract isn't like a regular tech job; you can’t just hand in a two-week notice. Walking away is desertion and leads to prison. Beyond the legal stuff, there’s a massive privilege in telling the people who protect us to just go home. If every soldier with a conscience actually listened to you and quit, the only people left carrying the weapons would be the ones who don't care about ethics, which is a terrifying thought. These soldiers didn’t start the war, and they aren’t the ones making the policy, but they have a sworn oath to the country and the Constitution that goes way deeper than whoever happens to be in the White House. At the end of the day, we rely on them to keep things from falling apart, and blaming the person in uniform for the "bad boss" at the top feels like a total misunderstanding of what service and sacrifice actually look like.
My nephew was a Marine and got out as soon as he saw the results of the 2024 election. We are so grateful
I guess Hillary and Donald weren't the same after all.
Why won’t you just let us bury our heads further in the sand and go about our shameless business? Sheesh!
Peter Z. As a Vietnam Vet and former anti-war activist, my opinion is that HN's arguments about how soldiers should quit asap because they have a "bad boss" is not persuasive. We did not have such Trumpian "bad bosses" during the Vietnam War but we committed war crimes just the same. The GI movement then advised soldiers/sailors/marines on how to become conscientious objectors based on the nature of that war and what they were being asked to do. It then became their decision based on their circumstances. That's the issue not the badness of Trump or his sidekicks. Would someone like to reestablish a new GI movement? Si Se Puede!
Mr. Nolan, your op-ed ignores American military history showing many instances of our country's military doing "bad things" such as criminal attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure and actions that either violated domestic or international laws. For your edification, here are a couple of recent references online: /www.newyorker.com/podcast/in-the-dark/the-war-crimes-that-the-military-buried and www.resistance.org/illegal-us-wars