CORRODING THE MORALITY OF THE MILITARY
What Donald Trump, commander-in-chief, hath wrought
On Dec. 5, 1969, Life magazine ran a front-page story about U.S. Army troops massacring civilians in My Lai, Vietnam. That grotesque incident sadly came to define for many U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Americans were outraged that U.S. soldiers murdered innocent women, children and old men. But they were also outraged by the apparent indifference of Army leadership. Leaders’ seeming “business as usual” reaction to this catastrophic breakdown of good order and discipline was rightly seen as contributing to the military’s descent into immorality represented by My Lai.
In the decades that followed, the U.S. military committed to ensuring such a breakdown would never again occur. Renewed emphasis was placed on understanding the laws of war and, critically, on ensuring meaningful accountability for those who crossed the line of legality in war. This commitment to respect for law in war became a central feature of preserving the honor, discipline and effectiveness of our armed forces.
Today, military leaders are trained to understand that indifference to acts of misconduct by their subordinates, even if seemingly insignificant or trivial, guarantees disaster. The breakdown in morality and leadership within Lieutenant William Calley’s platoon at My Lai resulted from a systemic series of disciplinary failures and command indifference, and the U.S. military educates its leaders using this tragic example to this day.
Instead of a My Lai-type breakdown within, the military today faces a threat from the top: a commander-in-chief unwilling to appreciate the relationship between compliance with the laws of war, compliance that includes punishing violations — and the combat effectiveness of our armed forces. President Trump’s recent forays into military justice promote disrespect for our fundamentally American way of fighting, and hence threaten national security.
Trump’s unprincipled interventions include a pardon earlier this year of an Army soldier convicted by court martial of murdering a defenseless detainee; the pardon of an Army lieutenant convicted (based primarily on the testimony of his own subordinates) of murder; the preemptive pardon of an Army major who admitted in a CIA interview to murdering an Afghan man; and the nullification of the punishment meted out by a court-martial for a Navy SEAL convicted of posing for photos with a deceased enemy fighter.
Such unprecedented presidential condonation of war crimes undermines the experience-based judgments of senior commanders, denigrates the integrity of the military justice system, and exacerbates public misunderstanding of why it is so important to ensure accountability for battlefield misconduct.
Trump seems to think excusing bad behavior in war is a necessary corrective to years of politically correct, eggheaddriven constraints placed on warfighters, which, he thinks, erode our ability to win wars. He seems to think that military men and women have been wrongly dragged through the mud by commanders and elites for doing the job they’ve asked them to do.
“We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!” he has tweeted.
The president’s uninformed instinct to glorify raw brutality, and to view American war criminals as victims of an unfair disciplinary system, directly contradicts military commanders and military juries entrusted to use the criminal law process established by Congress to ensure a disciplined, honorable and morally grounded force. How ironic that the efforts of military leaders to prevent the type of indifference that defined the military’s initial My Lai response are being undercut by a president who champions those in uniform who, when tempted to cross the line from lawful wartime violence to unlawful brutality, fail.
Commanders understand that honor in war means resisiting this temptation, and Trump’s actions betray them and America.
Other presidents understood what Trump does not. President Theodore Roosevelt, whom Trump professors to admire, also faced the challenge of acting on a court-martial conviction of a highly distinguished veteran with decades of military service. In Roosevelt’s case, it was Brigadier Gen. Jacob H. Smith’s conviction by general courtmartial for allowing waterboarding by U.S. Army personnel under his command as they struggled to deal with the Philippines’ Moro Rebellion following the Spanish American War.
Roosevelt, a Medal of Honor recipient himself, rejected the assertion that the enemy’s illicit conduct justified illegal brutality. Instead, in approving the general’s conviction Roosevelt noted that he “heartily approve[s] the employment of the sternest measures necessary to put a stop to such atrocities, and to bring the war to a close…But the very fact that warfare is of such character as to afford infinite provocation for the commission of acts of cruelty by junior officers and the enlisted men, must make the officers in high and responsible positions peculiarly careful in their bearing and conduct so as to keep a moral check over any acts of an improper character by their subordinates.”
T.R., like our military commanders today, understood that war does not provide an unbridled license to kill, but instead imposes an obligation to engage, on our nation’s behalf, in lawful and necessary violent actions. Because America as a nation gives our service members a warrant to engage in wartime violence, those in uniform bear an indelible obligation to respect the laws of war not only embraced but in