THE DUTY TO DISOBEY
WHAT THE VIDEO ACTUALLY SAID AND WHY IT MATTERS
There’s a lot of noise around the video released this past week by six Democratic lawmakers.
The president called them “traitors." His press secretary said all the president’s orders are lawful.
The White House suggested the message was “seditious behavior,” even “punishable by death." And the Department of Defence claims it has opened an investigation into Senator Mark Kelly.
But before we get lost in the performance, we need to return to what the video was actually referencing—the core legal doctrine that governs every U.S. service member.
It isn’t radical.
It isn’t new.
And it isn’t optional.
It’s written into the Uniform Code of Military Justice and reinforced by decades of U.S. military law:
Service members must obey lawful orders.
Service members must disobey unlawful orders.
(UCMJ Articles 90–92; DoD Law of War Manual; FM 27-10)
That is the rule.
The foundation.
The standard everyone in uniform is trained on.
The lawmakers were not inventing anything.
They were reminding the military of the most basic guardrail in American command authority.
And that reminder landed in a political moment where the guardrail itself is being bent.
I. How Orders Really Move Through the U.S. Military
The chain of command isn’t abstract.
It’s a system built to slow down rash decisions and filter power through law, structure, and professional judgment.
Here’s what it actually looks like when functioning the way it was designed:
1. The President sets direction.
He doesn’t micromanage operations.
He identifies objectives—defend this ally, deter that threat, reposition these forces.
In theory, he defines what must happen, not how it happens.
His authority is broad, but it’s not absolute, and law, treaties, and congressional mandates always bound it.
2. The Secretary of Defense turns that direction into policy.
The SecDef is the civilian head of the Department of Defense.
His job is to translate the president's intent into legally executable guidance.
This is often where the brakes or guardrails are applied:
Is this legal?
Does this violate international law?
Does this exceed statutory authority?
What are the risks?
The SecDef is the lawyer’s first line of defense, even when he isn’t one.
3. Combatant Commanders shape operational orders.
CENTCOM, INDOPACOM, EUCOM, AFRICOM, NORTHCOM, SOUTHCOM—these are the people who convert policy into an operational plan.
They decide:
Where forces move
What units deploy
What timeframes make sense
How the rules of engagement apply
What mission parameters are lawful
They’re responsible for sorting legal from illegal, practical from reckless.
These commanders are not political appointees—they are career officers with decades of experience—and they regularly tell presidents “no” when something violates the law or military ethics.
4. Officers implement the plan on the ground.
Battalion, brigade, and division commanders take the big-picture orders and translate them into concrete instructions.
They determine:
What their units can legally accomplish
Whether an order fits the mission
Whether anything violates the Law of Armed Conflict
Whether subordinates have the proper training and resources
If something is legally or morally off, officers are obligated to stop it.
5. Enlisted service members execute what is left.
They carry out the orders that have survived every layer of review above them.
By the time an order reaches a private, sergeant, or specialist, it has ideally been filtered multiple times:
by legality
by feasibility
by ethics
by the structure of command
by operational necessity
Their job is to trust the system, but they are still responsible for refusing an unlawful order.
They are the last stop in a long series of checks.
All of this rests on one central principle:
Orders are only binding if they are lawful.
Unlawful orders include:
orders that violate U.S. law,
orders that violate the Constitution,
orders that violate the Law of Armed Conflict,
orders that target civilians,
orders issued without proper authority,
orders designed to bypass judicial rulings,
orders demanding political repression or extrajudicial punishment.
The reminder that service members must refuse unlawful orders isn’t theoretical—it was carved into American military doctrine by some of the darkest chapters in its history.
After My Lai, when U.S. soldiers massacred hundreds of civilians in Vietnam, the defense of “just following orders” collapsed under its own weight.
The courts held that the duty to obey stops where the law begins, and the duty to refuse begins where illegality appears.
The Army rewrote training, doctrines, and ethics protocols to hammer home one message: an illegal order cannot be carried out, no matter who gives it.
After Abu Ghraib, when detainees in Iraq were tortured and degraded, the investigations again exposed a pattern: people tried to blame the chain of command, the atmosphere, the pressure, the chaos.
But the uniform doesn’t erase responsibility.
It sharpens it.
The reforms that followed—Law of Armed Conflict classes, mandatory ethics modules, command-climate reviews—all reinforced the same core principle: obedience is not a shield when the act is unlawful.
Across every scandal, every atrocity, every moment when the United States had to confront its own failures, the conclusion was the same:
Soldiers are not robots.
They are not order-taking machines.
They are responsible actors with legal duties that override rank, rhetoric, and political pressure.
That’s why the doctrine exists.
That’s why it is drilled into recruits.
That’s why it sits at the center of military law.
And that’s why the lawmakers’ reminder matters:
Because history shows what happens when people forget that disobedience to an unlawful command is not rebellion—it’s duty.
That’s what the video referenced.
Nothing more.
Nothing less.
II. Why the Reminder Matters Now
This is why the lawmakers’ reminder landed with such weight.
When the system is healthy, every layer of the command hierarchy checks the layer above it.
The president sets intent, but the law shapes it.
The Secretary of Defense refines it, the commanders filter it, the officers verify it, and the enlisted carry it out only once it’s been through all those safeguards.
That system works only when everyone trusts that those above them care about legality as much as they do about authority.
But when the president starts calling members of Congress “traitors,” toys with language about execution, insists his power is absolute, and has his staff claim that every order he gives is automatically lawful, the entire filtering mechanism is strained.
Suddenly, officers aren’t sure whether questioning an order will put a target on their back.
Commanders wonder if legal review will be seen as “disloyal." Enlisted personnel watch the news and begin to doubt whether the chain above them will uphold the law if pressured not to.
That’s when reminders stop being hypothetical.
They become necessary.
Because in a moment when political power begins to push past its legal boundaries, the military needs to hear, clearly and publicly, that their oath is to the Constitution—not to the man occupying the office.
III. What The Outcry Accidentally Reveals
The reaction to the video told us far more than the video itself ever could.
The lawmakers said “unlawful orders." Clear. Straight. Anchored in doctrine older than any administration.
The president answered as if they said “lawful orders." As if they were urging the military to disobey him.
As if the reminder of a legal boundary was a personal attack.
When a leader hears “illegal orders must be refused” and treats it as disloyalty, he’s revealing something about how he understands power. He’s showing us that, in his mind, the law doesn’t define the limits of authority—he does.
And in that frame, any reminder of constraint sounds like rebellion.
He didn’t dispute the doctrine.
He didn’t argue the legal standard.
He leapt straight to “traitor,” “sedition,” and “punishable by death." No hesitation, no nuance, just the instinctive reflex of someone who sees obedience as the default and accountability as the offense.
That kind of response doesn’t happen by accident.
It happens when a leader either:
doesn’t understand the law,
doesn’t respect it,
or doesn’t believe it applies to him in the first place.
And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
This isn’t about semantics or political spin.
It’s about a president who interpreted a simple, factual restatement of military obligation as an attempt to weaken him. The message wasn’t the threat—the limit was. And he reacted not to the words, but to the boundary they represented.
That’s not how a healthy republic behaves.
A healthy republic welcomes clarity about the rule of law.
A healthy republic expects its leaders to understand the difference between authority and legality.
But an unhealthy, brittle one starts to flinch at reminders of limits.
It treats the Constitution like an obstacle.
It treats oversight like hostility.
It treats legal duty like betrayal.
That’s what this outcry revealed: not a dispute over military protocol, but a presidency rattled by the idea that its power is not absolute.
And that reaction is its own kind of warning.
IV. Why This Moment Matters
Strip away the noise, and you’re left with a simple truth: the military’s duty to refuse unlawful orders is one of the last structural limits on presidential power. It’s not decorative. It’s not symbolic. It is the backbone of civilian control, the thing that keeps a commander-in-chief from sliding into something else.
That’s why this moment isn’t small.
When elected lawmakers restated a basic legal fact—that troops must refuse illegal orders—they weren’t challenging authority. They were reinforcing the boundary that keeps authority from swallowing everything around it. They were defending the guardrail that every administration, Republican and Democrat, has acknowledged for decades.
The president’s response reframed that reminder as an attack.
Not the illegal orders part—the limit part.
A leader comfortable with the Constitution doesn’t panic when someone cites it.
A leader grounded in the law doesn’t hear betrayal in the phrase “unlawful orders." A leader who understands the oath knows it’s not about loyalty to a person.
But when a president hears a reminder of legal boundaries as mutiny, you’re watching a shift in the relationship between power and accountability. You’re watching the idea of the presidency expand beyond its constitutional perimeter and test how far it can stretch before someone pushes back.
And the institutions are feeling it.
Commanders know their duty, but they also know how quickly promotions, assignments, and careers can be affected when the White House starts treating legal caution as disloyalty. Junior officers watch that and adjust their behavior. Enlisted personnel absorb the tension and begin to doubt whether the layers above them will hold. The chain of command bends not from orders, but from pressure.
That’s why the reminder mattered. Not because the law was unclear, but because the environment around it was shifting.
This moment isn’t about a 90-second video.
It’s about what the country reveals about itself when someone restates a basic legal truth, and the president answers with the language of execution and treason. It’s about the difference between a system built on law and a system built on personal authority. It’s about whether the chain of command is anchored in the Constitution or in the impulses of one man.
And when the reaction to a legal reminder becomes fiercer than the reminder itself, you don’t need leaks or memos to know something fundamental is being tested.
The video told service members what their oath requires.
The response told the rest of us what the presidency now expects.
And that’s why this moment matters, because whichever side of that split the country follows determines what kind of nation it becomes next.