Brett Wagner and J. Holmes Armstead, who both served as professors at the U.S. Naval War College, write:

Just because the commander in chief of our nation’s armed forces is also our duly elected president, with all the powers invested in that high office, that does not imply, in any way, that the president has unchecked power over the military. A president must follow the law, too, or face the consequences.

Normally, in a situation where subordinates believe themselves to have received what appears to be an unlawful order from their superior officer, that subordinate should object and then ask for clarification. Normally, this action would serve to alert the superior officer that there’s a problem.

In a hypothetical case such as this, however, where the order in question is coming directly from the president, this process would be turned on its ear — a commander in chief, in this case, who went to great pains to eliminate disagreement, in advance, by appointing malleable underlings who have agreed, also in advance, to blindly obey. Trump also systematically removed military lawyers who would normally act to screen inappropriate behavior and unlawful conduct. This signaled his desire from the beginning to subvert the law or to break it altogether.

Hopefully, our four-star military leaders are already discussing this privately amongst themselves. And they will be prepared, en masse, to inform their commander in chief that none of them will be implementing an illegal order.

One might reasonably expect Trump, at that point, to attempt to do what he always does: blast through the norm, invent a rationale on the fly and find himself a lackey who will carry out his bidding.

Fortunately, for American democracy and for the future of our military, that’s not how things work.

Should the president cross this immutable line in the sand — ordering military action against our NATO ally — the law has been broken.

Period.

At that point, the commander of the Military District of Washington — the officer who has criminal jurisdiction, through the Uniform Code of Military Justice, over all military personnel in the federal district, including the commander in chief — would bring Trump not in front of a sitting judge or a jury of his peers, as is the case in civilian court, but to a military tribunal. This tribunal would be empowered to try war crimes in a legal venue where the Supreme Court has no authority to grant immunity, as it did in its controversial 2024 ruling in Trump v. United States. Instead, the district commander would have the authority, the mechanism and the sacred duty to effectuate an arrest of Trump and to initiate criminal proceedings. [Continue reading…]