U.S. President Donald Trump salutes as members of the military carry a transfer case, during a dignified transfer of the remains of two Iowa National Guard members killed in Syria, Sgt. Edgar Torres Tovar and Sgt. William Howard, and Ayad Mansoor Sakat, of Macomb, Michigan, who was working as an interpreter in Syria, at Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware, U.S., December, 17, 2025. REUTERS/Nathan Howard
President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth flew into a rage when, in a video posted online in November, Sens. Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin and other Democratic lawmakers urged members of the U.S. Armed Forces to disobey orders if they are clearly "illegal." Trump, on his Truth Social platform, described the video as "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!"— a claim that Florida International University Eric R. Carpenter denounced as nonsense, saying, "In the video, the elected officials are just telling service members to follow the law. They are not telling service members to overthrow the government."
But the issue of military leaders disobeying orders if they are illegal persists. According to CNN reporters Natasha Bertrand and Zachary Cohen, a U.S. Army brigadier general had a recommendation for responding to illegal orders: ask to retire.
Bertrand and Cohen, in an article published on December 19, report, "How should a military commander respond if they determine they have received an unlawful order? Request to retire — and refrain from resigning in protest, which could be seen as a political act, or picking a fight to get fired. That was the previously unreported guidance that Brig. Gen. Eric Widmar, the top lawyer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave to the country's top general, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, in November, according to sources familiar with the discussion."
Caine, according to the CNN journalists, was given that recommendation after watching the video with Kelly, Slotkin and others.
"He asked Widmar, according to the sources, what the latest guidance was on how to determine whether an order was lawful and how a commander should reply if it is not," Bertrand and Cohen explain. "Widmar responded that they should consult with their legal adviser if they're unsure, the sources said. But ultimately, if they determine that an order is illegal, they should consider requesting retirement."
The CNN reporters add, "The guidance sheds new light on how top military officials are thinking about an issue that has reached a fever pitch in recent weeks, as lawmakers and legal experts have repeatedly questioned the legality of the U.S. military's counternarcotics operations in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, including intense scrutiny of a 'double-tap' strike that deliberately killed survivors on September 2."
According to legal experts interviewed by CNN, there is a clear distinction between disobeying an order because it is "patently illegal" and disobeying an order simply because they disagree with a policy.
Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Dan Maurer told CNN that "in the face of an unlawful order," military leaders should "disobey it if confident that the order is unlawful" and "report it through the chain of command."
"If the guidance does not explicitly advise service members that they have a duty to disobey unlawful orders," Maurer told CNN, "the guidance is not a legitimate statement of professional military ethics and the law."
Read Natasha Bertrand and Zachary Cohen's full article for CNN at this link.