Any story about resistance within the military must begin by recognizing that it’s not an easy thing to do. Apparently, that’s true even for a much-decorated retired Navy commander, former astronaut and sitting United States senator. I’m talking about Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. He was one of six Democratic legislators, all military veterans or former intelligence officers, who, on November 18, released a 90-second video reminding members of the military that the oath they took on enlisting requires them to refuse illegal orders.

The implicit context was the Trump administration’s deployment of National Guard troops to American cities, but their message took on added urgency after the Washington Post published an exposé about an order coming from high up to kill survivors of an airstrike in the Caribbean Sea. 

Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, who served in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), on the National Security Council and at the Defense Department, and had three tours of duty as a CIA analyst in Iraq, spearheaded the action. She was joined by Kelly; Pennsylvania Representatives Chrissy Houlahan (former Air Force captain) and Chris Deluzio (former Navy lieutenant with one tour in Iraq); New Hampshire Representative Maggie Goodlander (Navy Reserve lieutenant, intelligence); and Colorado Representative Jason Crow (Army Ranger, three tours in Iraq).

Speaking directly to the camera, their voices imbued with sincerity, the six stated their affiliations, noted the precariousness of what the military is being asked to do in the second presidency of Donald Trump, and repeated their duty-to-refuse refrain, ending with a rousing, “Don’t give up the ship!” It was pretty straightforward stuff and, except for a few digs at the administration, an accurate statement of legal fact.

On enlistment, everyone in the military takes an oath of loyalty not to a person, a party or any form of politics, but to the Constitution. Enlistees in all branches also pledge to obey orders from their officers and the president. As stipulated in the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), it’s clear that this means only lawful orders.

Officers take a slightly different oath: they, too, swear to support and defend the Constitution, but their oath doesn’t include anything about obeying orders from their superiors or the president, presumably because they’re responsible for giving orders and ensuring that those orders are lawful. Officers reaffirm their oath whenever they’re promoted.

Across the board, the UCMJ, the Nuremberg Principles and the US Constitution establish the right and responsibility of servicemembers to refuse illegal orders or to refuse to participate in illegal wars, war crimes or unconstitutional deployments.

The straight-speaking six

Never one to bother with legal niceties, Donald Trump (commander-in-chief, no military service) quickly denounced the video on Truth Social as “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL,” adding, “Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL.” He also posted: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” He then backtracked on the death threat on Fox’s Brian Kilmeade Show. 

Members of his administration followed Trump’s lead with ever more strident outrage. Within days, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (former Army National Guard major, one tour each in Afghanistan and Iraq) called the lawmakers the “Seditious Six.” He then began to investigate Kelly, threatening to recall him to active duty so that he could be court-martialed for misconduct. 

He went after Kelly because, as a retired military officer, he’s the only one of the six who could still fall under the military’s jurisdiction. Nonetheless, it’s unusual, to say the least, for a secretary of defense (oops, war!) to think about punishing an officer so long after he has retired. Meanwhile, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began investigating all six of those legislators. (Consider it unlikely indeed, however, that the FBI will also investigate the death threats the six have received.) 

Less half-baked responses came from places like Military.com, which criticized the legislators for attempting to politicize the military by bypassing the chain of command and speaking directly to the troops, while not citing specific examples of illegal orders and so potentially confusing them. If true, this wouldn’t be the first time this country’s troops were confused by orders. As a Marine sergeant testified at the 2008 Winter Soldier hearings, “During the siege of Fallujah [in Iraq], we changed rules of engagement more often than we changed our underwear.” As for politicizing the military, you need look no further than the Trump version of political theater — National Guard deployments to Democratic-run cities on his shitlist.

The straight-speaking six and their supporters were anything but cowed by the accusations. In a joint response to the president, they proclaimed their love for this country and fealty to the Constitution before concluding, “Our servicemembers should know that we have their backs as they fulfill their oath to the Constitution and obligation to follow only lawful orders. It is not only the right thing to do, but also our duty … This is a time for moral clarity.” 

In a town hall in Tucson, Kelly said of Trump and Hegseth, “They’re not serious people, and I’m not backing down.” At the University of Pittsburgh (repeatedly designated a Military Friendly School), someone projected pictures of the six legislators onto its landmark 42-story Cathedral of Learning under the message, “This is what courage looks like.”

It might normally seem unlikely that Kelly could be punished for such constitutionally protected speech, a protection particularly robust for members of Congress. Unfortunately, “unlikely” could be considered the Trump administration’s middle name, and by now we should have learned that, in this political moment, anything is possible. 

Playing armchair psychologist, I have no idea if Trump really believes that video to be seditious or if he even knows what actually constitutes sedition. I doubt it matters to him. For whatever reason — distraction? attention-grabbing? meat for his base? unbridled id? — he used that video to effectively change the subject, while a pliant media and public largely went along with him. In the process, he managed to refocus attention (yet again) on himself and his minions at the — yes, War, not Defense — Department and the Department of (In)Justice, and on protected versus seditious speech, as well as on courageous versus outrageous politicians. Take your pick, just don’t talk about what members of the military are being asked to do these days and how they might themselves think about such orders. 

Worth the risk?

Joy Metzler, a 24-year-old graduate of the Air Force Academy, left the military as a conscientious objector this past April. She credits two required courses on law and ethics at the Academy for leading her to first question and then conclude that she couldn’t support her country’s role in the then-ongoing genocide in Gaza. “The thought of being given an order that was illegal or unconstitutional was almost unthinkable to me at the time, I just didn’t think it happened,” she emailed me recently. “Line officers, low ranks, sure — from people who didn’t understand the law — but I never imagined one would come from the president or the secretary of defense.”

How much time and attention are given to the legal and moral intricacies of war-making, no doubt, varies from branch to branch, unit to unit, commander to commander of the military. Whatever enlistees or officers are taught about resisting illegal orders is, of course, wildly outweighed by what they’re taught about the need to obey orders, which is inculcated into them until it becomes a reflexive response. Military units aren’t debating societies for good reason, and military training strongly discourages disobedience of any sort, but even more to the point, what is or isn’t legal isn’t necessarily clear-cut.

Military law can hold servicemembers accountable for participating in illegal actions, even if they were following orders. Nonetheless, a recent survey found that while four out of five active-duty troops understand their obligation to disobey illegal orders, they are far less clear about which orders they would disobey. “Starving [a] civilian population” or “shooting unarmed civilians” were cited most often as orders “so obviously unlawful” that they would be disobeyed, but by only 43% and 45% of those responding to each possibility. Yet, when asked if they would follow an order “to shoot into a crowd of unarmed civilians protesting US government policy and refusing to disperse,” 59% said they would.

Civil courts have waffled and disagreed about whether recent orders to the military are legal, and the Trump administration has been known to ignore rulings that go against it. For instance, assessments of the legality of sending National Guard troops from different states into Chicago, Los Angeles, Memphis, Portland (Oregon) and Washington, DC, have changed almost weekly. And while legal experts generally agree that the airstrikes on what may or may not be drug-running boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean are illegal under international law, Congress is just beginning to dip its toe into the issue. If the courts and Congress can’t figure all this out, imagine the risk for servicemembers, especially in the lower ranks, trying to do so on their own. 

Ready response team veterans

While in uniform, service members have limited speech rights and the military generally suppresses dissent, so veterans are in a far better position to question military policy. Veterans For Peace (VFP) used the uproar over the lawmakers’ video to reinforce its opposition to the murderous airstrikes in the Caribbean, genocide in Gaza and the deployment of troops to American cities. They and other veteran-related organizations have long been pushing back at iffy, illegal or immoral orders, often by committing disobedience of the civil kind. Here is a distinctly incomplete rundown of some of their actions.

On Easter Sunday 2024, VFP member Larry Hebert, an Air Force senior airman then on active duty in Spain, began a hunger strike in front of the White House to protest US support for Israel’s war in Gaza. He was inspired by the resolve of Aaron Bushnell, also an active-duty airman, who had set himself on fire at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, the month before, to protest that nightmare.

When Hebert was ordered back to his base, two VFP members took his place. As the barbarity in Gaza progressed, antiwar veterans continued their opposition in the People’s Arms Embargo, a series of protests blocking entrances to Travis Air Force Base in California, where planes were taking off to deliver weapons to Israel. Twelve people were arrested at a protest there on April 9 of this year.

Next came a 40-day Fast for Gaza, which ended this past July 1. That protest grew out of a conversation between two veteran activists, Mike Ferner, a Navy corpsman during the Vietnam era, and Phil Tottenham, who had served in the Marines more recently. VFP took up the idea, and 38 other organizations joined in to demand full humanitarian aid for Gaza and an end to US weapons deliveries to Israel.

About 800 people took part in the fast around the country, while a handful of regulars staged a hunger strike outside the US Mission to the United Nations. That fast culminated in a “die-in” at the Israeli mission in New York City, where 28 people were arrested, after which Ferner threw barely defrosted, bright red cow’s blood on a window at the American UN mission. He, too, got arrested. 

When Trump made good on his threats to send National Guard troops into American cities, these actions expanded to include resistance there. In September, aiming to speak directly to active-duty, reserve and National Guard personnel, the progressive foreign policy coalition Win Without War launched a new project, Not What You Signed Up For. That project began with a mobile billboard and posters in Washington, DC, asking, “Is this what you signed up for?” and directing anyone with questions or misgivings to a website listing three counseling and support organizations: About Face: Veterans Against the War, the GI Rights Hotline and the National Lawyers Guild’s Military Law Task Force. Billboards subsequently went up near Fort Bragg and Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and near US Southern Command headquarters in Florida, among other places.

In the project’s first month, the accompanying resource webpage got about 8,000 unique visitors. By November, it was nearly 20,000. About Face Organizing Director Brittany DeBarros says that she alone spoke with more than 100 active servicemembers looking for support this year. 

In June, on the eve of the nationwide No Kings protests and the costly Trump birthday celebration (also known as the Army’s 250th anniversary parade), members of VFP and About Face, ranging in age from their 20s to 87, held a sit-in on the steps of the US Capitol to protest Trump’s National Guard deployments. About 60 of them were charged with crossing a police line and arrested, including the 87-year-old. 

Which takes us to this Veterans Day, when military-affiliated and labor union antiwar groups organized their own celebrations under the banner “Vets Say No,” as protests against the administration’s use (and misuse) of the military only continued to grow. Crowds gathered in cities around the country, including in Washington, DC, and a frigid Boston.  

While this isn’t yet enough to constitute a trend, let alone a movement of resistance within the military, it gives that controversy over the video of those Democratic legislators a necessary (and underreported) context. It also suggests at least one reason why President Trump was so eager to deflect attention from the import of their message. 

Of course, what he said in response to them wasn’t just meant to change the subject. It was typical of his usual intolerance of any challenge to his version of authority. And I don’t mean to minimize the importance of what those Democrat politicians did either. Though they’re only a handful of the 98 veterans in Congress and in the minority party, they have the standing to be heard, including among their colleagues. It’s possible, for instance, that their outspokenness lent both cover and courage to other legislators on both sides of the aisle to question, as they recently did, the legality of the military’s murky and wildly destructive acts off the Venezuelan coast. 

What I want to do here is refocus attention on the underlying message in that video from congressional representatives and its significance for enlistees, reservists and part-time military members: that they have the power — as individuals and supportive groups — to resist what they know to be wrong. Admittedly, doing so will be anything but easy. It may be scary, confusing and lonely. But simply recognizing that you have the legal capacity to do what’s right is no small thing. It may even help protect servicemembers against the soul-crushing transgression of one’s innate moral code that has come to be known as “moral injury.” 

When military members have claimed such power and refused blind military obedience — during the Vietnam War and the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — it has had a significant impact on this country’s politics and policies, as well as on individual lives. But of course, the responsibility doesn’t fall only to the people in our military. Maybe we could all join in on a chorus or two of doin’-the-right-thing rag.

[TomDispatch first published this piece.]

[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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