Donald Trump’s threats to carry out mass bombing of civilian infrastructure in Iran present US military officers with a dilemma: disobey orders or help commit war crimes. Legal experts say attacking Iran’s infrastructure would constitute a war crime, raising questions about whether military officers would be held responsible.
In an expletive-laden threat, Trump set a Tuesday 8pm Washington time deadline for the Iranian government to open the Strait of Hormuz or face “Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one”. He wrote on his Truth Social platform on Sunday: “There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.” Three days earlier, the president had made clear what he meant by “Power Day”. “We are going to hit each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously,” he said in prepared remarks amplified by the State Department’s social media accounts.
There is little debate among legal experts that such an attack on the life-supporting infrastructure for 93 million Iranians would constitute a war crime. “Such rhetorical statements – if followed through – would amount to the most serious war crimes – and thus the president’s statements place service members in a profoundly challenging situation,” two former judge advocate general (JAG) officers, Margaret Donovan and Rachel VanLandingham, wrote on the website Just Security on Monday. They noted that Trump’s boast that he would bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages”, and the order by his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, to show “no quarter, no mercy” were not just “plainly illegal” but also represented a rupture from the moral and legal principles that US military personnel had been “trained to follow their entire careers”.
Charli Carpenter, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said there were many historical examples of service-members questioning orders, refusing to obey, passively disobeying or even intervening to stop war crimes. She cited as an example US soldiers who refused to take part in the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, including a helicopter pilot who threatened to shoot the perpetrators. In his court martial, the officer who ordered his men to gun down hundreds of Vietnamese villagers, 2nd Lt William Calley, argued that he was only obeying orders, but the court ruled that was no defence as such orders were “palpably illegal”.
The question is whether officers who carried out orders to bomb Iranian power stations and bridges could argue that they did not know it was “palpably illegal”. When Democratic members of Congress published a video message in November telling US service members “you can refuse illegal orders, you must refuse illegal orders”, Trump went on Truth Social to accuse them of “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH”. “There are many factors that make it hard to say ‘no’ or stand up to stop war crimes, especially where there are grey areas in the law,” Carpenter said. “What the law requires of enlisted troops is to disobey only ‘manifestly unlawful’ orders – orders so egregiously unlawful that a person of ordinary understanding would know they were wrong. However, this skill and moral judgment is not drilled into troops in the same way as they are taught to follow the chain of command and go along with their small units, and troops can also be court-martialled for insubordination if they guess wrong.”
Since taking office last year, Hegseth has made it harder for officers in the chain of command to find legal advice by firing the Pentagon’s top JAGs, and dissolving the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response unit set up by the Biden administration. Ordinary soldiers have the last-resort option of calling a “GI rights hotline” and calls have reportedly risen sharply under the Trump administration. A survey led by Carpenter last year found that most service members can distinguish between legal and illegal orders. “A majority of them understand their duty to disobey, and can give concrete examples of situations where they should,” she said. “Recognising those situations in real time and acting appropriately is harder than in a survey.”
