Quote:
Originally Posted by BDHarrison
Back channel secret talks that several people have input on are standard procedure. Having to use those back channels to promise you won't let your president do anything stupid is probably very abnormal.
It probably happened a lot during the cold war, or similar principles were likely followed. The typical example would be to just silently ignore direct engagements that happened during proxy wars or along hot borders.
These days I suspect it is rarer. Not that the current strategic climate isn't complicated, in many ways it is more complicated. But there are less engagements with opponents of the type that can eradicate you or near eradicate you, so the cost is less for carrying out a bad order.
Quote:
Originally Posted by phoneaccount
One of the worst things for a country is when the military becomes an independent actor. He should be removed and a court martial should decide whether a crime was committed. It’s a brave new world if the chairman of the joint chiefs makes policy. It’s treason on its face to warn an adversary of an attack. He didn’t do that but said he would so attempted treason? Treason in the third degree?
It is not the duty of an officer or a soldier to blindly follow orders, militaries of modern democracies since the Nurnberg trials has generally codified the law of war. Ignoring the hyperbolic debate of how well that works, it certainly does allow you to refuse illegal orders. On the higher level of the command chain, it should surprise no-one that there is likely available protocol for making such determinations.
What can confuse debates on the issue is the authority to issue certain orders. What you generally can't do is question certain authorities. For example a general couldn't just blindly determine that the US president has no authority to give him an order. But that the authority can not be questioned does not mean the
order can not be questioned. And yes, this is hazy area that gets complicated fast with so many slippery slopes it is hard to keep track. Which is why you generally want good people around in these positions, because no rulebook is going to save you from the bad ones.
That said, I'm not expert on US command and control protocol, and the US presidential power over military matters is extremely broad. Technically war powers belongs to congress, but the president can certainly engage in armed conflict in a manner that makes those war powers more a matter of book-keeping than checks and balances.