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I have been thinking about writing a comment on the US Department of War breaking the Laws of War with its’ killing shipwrecked survivers of a probably illegal strike on an alleges drug smuggling boat in the Carribean. Then I came across this editorial by David French who says everything I was trying to say, much more competently and clearly that I ever could. So instead of re-writing what he says, I decided it would be better if I just let hime speak directly to you.<\/p>\n
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By David French
Opinion Columnist
You\u2019re reading the David French newsletter. Reflections on law and culture, war and peace, and the deeper trends that define and divide America. Get it sent to your inbox.
In their military campaign in South America, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth aren\u2019t just defying the Constitution and breaking the law. They are attacking the very character and identity of the American military.
To make this case, I have to begin in the most boring way possible \u2014 by quoting a legal manual. Bear with me.
Specifically, it\u2019s the most recent edition of the Department of Defense Law of War Manual. Tucked away on page 1,088 are two sentences that illustrate the gravity of the crisis in the Pentagon: \u201cThe requirement to refuse to comply with orders to commit law of war violations applies to orders to perform conduct that is clearly illegal or orders that the subordinate knows, in fact, are illegal. For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.\u201d
Here\u2019s another key line: \u201cIt is forbidden to declare that no quarter will be given.\u201d A no quarter order is an order directing soldiers to kill every combatant, including prisoners, the sick and the wounded. The manual continues, \u201cMoreover, it is also prohibited to conduct hostilities on the basis that there shall be no survivors, or to threaten the adversary with the denial of quarter.\u201d
Before we go any further, it\u2019s important to define our terms. This newsletter is going to focus on the laws of war, not a related concept called rules of engagement. The laws of war reflect the mandatory, minimum level of lawful conduct, and all soldiers are legally obligated to obey them at all times and in all conflicts.
Rules of engagement are rules devised by commanders that are often more restrictive than the laws of war. For example, when I was in Iraq, our rules of engagement sometimes kept us from attacking lawful targets, in part because we wanted to be particularly careful not to inflict civilian casualties.
In my service, we were often frustrated by the rules of engagement. We did not, however, question the laws of war.
There are now good reasons to believe that the U.S. military, under the command of President Trump and Hegseth, his secretary of defense, has blatantly violated the laws of war. On Nov. 28, The Washington Post reported that Hegseth issued a verbal order to \u201ckill everybody\u201d the day that the United States launched its military campaign against suspected drug traffickers.
According to The Post, the first strike on the targeted speedboat left two people alive in the water. The commander of the operation then ordered a second strike to kill the shipwrecked survivors, apparently \u2014 according to The Post \u2014 \u201cbecause they could theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo.\u201d If that reporting is correct, then we have clear evidence of unequivocal war crimes \u2014 a no quarter order and a strike on the incapacitated crew of a burning boat.
And if it\u2019s true, those war crimes are the fault not of hotheaded recruits who are fighting for their lives in the terrifying fog and fury of ground combat but rather of two of the highest-ranking people in the American government, Hegseth and Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the head of Special Operations Command \u2014 the man the administration has identified as the person who gave the order for the second strike.
My colleagues in the newsroom followed on Monday with a report of their own, one that largely mirrored The Post\u2019s reporting, though it presented more evidence of Hegseth\u2019s and Bradley\u2019s potential defenses. Hegseth, our sources said, did not order the second strike, and the second strike might have been designed to sink the boat, not kill survivors.
But if that\u2019s the explanation, why wasn\u2019t the full video released? The administration released limited video footage of the first strike, which created the impression of the instant, total destruction of the boat and its inhabitants. Now we know there was much more to see.
At the same time, Hegseth and the Pentagon have offered a series of puzzling and contradictory statements. Sean Parnell, the Pentagon spokesman, told The Post that its \u201centire narrative was false.\u201d
Hegseth weighed in with a classic version of what you might call a nondenial denial. In a social media post, he said the Post report was \u201cfabricated, inflammatory and derogatory,\u201d but rather than explain what actually happened (and make no mistake, he knows exactly what happened), he followed up with an extraordinary paragraph:
As we\u2019ve said from the beginning, and in every statement, these highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be \u201clethal, kinetic strikes.\u201d The declared intent is to stop lethal drugs, destroy narco-boats, and kill the narco-terrorists who are poisoning the
American people. Every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization.
\u201cBiden coddled terrorists,\u201d Hegseth wrote later in the same post. \u201cWe kill them.\u201d
We shouldn\u2019t forget that this incident occurred against the backdrop of Hegseth\u2019s obvious disdain for military lawyers. He has called them \u201cjagoffs\u201d and \u2014 along with Trump \u2014 fired the senior military lawyers in the Navy and Air Force.
We also know that the commander of Southern Command, which is responsible for operations in Central and South America, Adm. Alvin Holsey, announced that he was stepping down after holding the position for less than a year. As our newsroom reported, two sources \u201csaid that Admiral Holsey had raised concerns about the mission and the attacks on the alleged drug boats.\u201d
He announced his departure in October, weeks after the September strike.
Unlike many wartime incidents, airstrike incidents can be rather easy to investigate. Unless an airstrike is in response to an immediate battlefield emergency, the intelligence justifying the strike and the orders authorizing it are frequently preserved in writing, and the video and audio of the strikes are typically recorded. If this Pentagon, which proudly calls itself the \u201cmost transparent\u201d in history, were to release the full attack video and audio, it would help answer many questions.
It\u2019s a mistake, however, to limit our focus to the legality of this specific strike \u2014 or even to the important question of the legality of the Caribbean strikes in general. We live in an era in which our nation\u2019s first principles require constant defense.
In other words, as we dig into incidents like this one, we cannot presume that Americans are operating from a shared set of moral and constitutional values or even a basic operating knowledge of history. We will have to teach the basic elements of American character anew, to a population that is losing its grasp on our national ideals.
The laws of war aren\u2019t woke. They\u2019re not virtue signaling. And they\u2019re not a sign that the West has forgotten how to fight. Instead, they provide the American military with a number of concrete benefits.
First, complying with the laws of war can provide a battlefield advantage. This year I read Antony Beevor\u2019s classic history of the end of Nazi Germany, \u201cThe Fall of Berlin 1945.\u201d I was struck by a fascinating reality: Hitler\u2019s troops fought fanatically against the Soviets not simply to preserve Hitler\u2019s rule (most knew the cause was lost) but also to slow the Red Army down, to buy more time for civilians and soldiers to escape to American, British and French lines.
In short, because of our humanity and decency, Germans surrendered when they would have fought. The contrast with the brutality of the Soviets saved American lives.
I saw this reality in Iraq. By the end of my deployment in 2008, insurgents started surrendering to us, often without a fight. In one memorable incident, a terrorist walked up to the front gate of our base and turned himself in. But had we treated our prisoners the way that prisoners were treated at Abu Ghraib, I doubt we would have seen the same response.
Men will choose death over torture and humiliation, but many of those men will choose decent treatment in prison over probable death in battle.
Second, the laws of war make war less savage and true peace possible. One of the reasons the war in the Pacific was so unrelentingly grim was that the Japanese military never made the slightest pretense of complying with the laws of war. They would shoot shipwrecked survivors. They would torture prisoners. They would fight to the death even when there was no longer any military point to resistance.
We were hardly perfect, but part of our own fury was directly related to relentless Japanese violations of the laws of war. We became convinced that the Japanese would not surrender until they faced the possibility of total destruction. And when both sides abandon any commitment to decency and humanity, then the object of war changes \u2014 from victory to annihilation.
Even if only one side upholds the law of war, it not only makes war less brutal; it preserves the possibility of peace and reconciliation. That\u2019s exactly what happened at the end of World War II. For all of our faults, we never became like the Soviets and thus have a very different relationship with our former foes.
Finally, the laws of war help preserve a soldier\u2019s soul. We are a nation built around the notion of human dignity. Our Declaration of Independence highlights the worth of every person. Our Bill of Rights stands as one of the world\u2019s great statements of human dignity. It is contrary to the notion of virtuous American citizenship to dehumanize people, to brutalize and oppress them.
We are also a quite religious society, and all of the great faiths that are central to American life teach that human beings possess incalculable worth.
If we order soldiers to contradict those values, we can inflict a profound moral injury on them \u2014 a moral injury that can last a lifetime. I still think about a 2015 article in The Atlantic by Maggie Puniewska. She described soldiers haunted by the experience of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
\u201cSome of these soldiers describe experiences in which they, or someone close to them, violated their moral code,\u201d she wrote, \u201churting a civilian who turned out to be unarmed, shooting at a child wearing explosives, or losing trust in a commander who became more concerned with collecting decorative pins than protecting the safety of his troops.\u201d Others, she said, citing a clinical psychologist who worked with service members who
recently returned from deployments, \u201care haunted by their own inaction, traumatized by something they witnessed and failed to prevent.\u201d
There are moral injuries that are unavoidable. I\u2019m still haunted by decisions I made in Iraq, even though each one complied with the laws of war. Armed conflict is horrific, and your spirit rebels against the experience. But I can\u2019t imagine the guilt of criminal conduct, of deliberately killing the people I\u2019m supposed to protect.
In fact, when I first read the Washington Post story, I thought of the terrified pair, struggling helplessly in the water before the next missile ended their lives. But I also thought of the men or women who fired those missiles. How does their conscience speak to them now? How will it speak to them in 10 years?
I want to close with two stories \u2014 one from Iraq and one from Ukraine. There was a moment in my deployment when our forces were in hot pursuit of a known terrorist. We had caught him attempting to fire mortar rounds into an American outpost. Just when we had him in our sights, he scooped up what looked like a toddler and started running with the kid in his arms.
No one had to give the order to hold fire. There wasn\u2019t one soldier who wanted to shoot and risk the toddler\u2019s life. So we followed him until the combination of heat and exhaustion made him put the child down. Even then we didn\u2019t kill him. We were able to capture him without using lethal force.
I\u2019ll never forget that day \u2014 and the unspoken agreement that we would save that child.
Now, let\u2019s contrast that moment of decency with the stories I heard in the town of Bucha, just northwest of Kyiv. It was the site of some of the most intense fighting in the first phases of Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine. As I walked in part of the battlefield, I heard the stories of Russian soldiers looting and murdering their way across northern Ukraine.
One woman told me that the Russians shot a neighbor, a civilian, in his front yard and then threatened his wife when she tried to leave her home to retrieve his body. So he just lay there, day after day, until the Russians were finally driven back. That\u2019s the character of the Russian military, and it\u2019s been the character of the Russian military for generations.
Something else happened when I first read the Washington Post story; I instinctively rejected it. The account was completely at odds with my experience. There is not an officer I served with who would issue a no quarter order. There is not an officer I served with who would have given the order to kill survivors struggling in the water.
But I also knew that Hegseth is trying to transform the military. As The Wall Street Journal reported, he has been on a \u201cdecades-long quest\u201d to rid the military of \u201cstupid rules of engagement\u201d \u2014 even to the point of becoming a champion of soldiers
convicted of war crimes. In one of his books, he wrote that he told soldiers who served under his command in Iraq to
disregard legal advice about the use of lethal force.
I don\u2019t think that all of our rules of engagement are wise. I have expressed profound doubts about many of the rules that were imposed in Iraq and Afghanistan that went far beyond the requirements of the laws of war. Not every soldier accused of crimes is guilty of crimes.
But there is a difference between reforming the rules and abandoning the law \u2014 or, even worse, viewing the law as fundamentally hostile to the military mission. There is a difference between defending soldiers against false accusations and rationalizing and excusing serious crimes.
The pride of an American soldier isn\u2019t just rooted in our lethality. It\u2019s rooted in our sense of honor. It\u2019s rooted in our compassion. We believe ourselves to be different because we so often behave differently.
Hegseth, however, has a different vision, one of unrestrained violence divorced from congressional and legal accountability. If that vision becomes reality, he won\u2019t reform the military; he\u2019ll wreck it. And he\u2019ll wreck it in the worst way possible, by destroying its integrity, by stripping its honor and by rejecting the hard-earned lessons and vital values that have made the American military one of the most-trusted institutions in the United States.<\/p>\n
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I have been thinking about writing a comment on the US Department of War breaking the Laws of War with its’ killing shipwrecked survivers of a probably illegal strike on an alleges drug smuggling boat in the Carribean. Then I came across this editorial by David French who says everything I was trying to say, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.dafko.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.dafko.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.dafko.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.dafko.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.dafko.ch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=549"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blog.dafko.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":560,"href":"https:\/\/blog.dafko.ch\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549\/revisions\/560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.dafko.ch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.dafko.ch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.dafko.ch\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}