Can Troops Refuse Illegal Orders?
Yes. Under American military law, troops not only can refuse an illegal order — when an order is patently illegal, they must refuse it. Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice punishes a service member for disobeying a lawful order, and the Manual for Courts-Martial is explicit that the duty to obey "does not apply to a patently illegal order, such as one that directs the commission of a crime." That is the whole answer, and it has been the law for generations.
The plain reality is that this rule sits in the military's own rulebook, taught to every recruit, while the reality on the ground is that six members of Congress are being threatened with prosecution for saying it out loud. In November 2025, Sens. Elissa Slotkin and Mark Kelly and Reps. Jason Crow, Maggie Goodlander, Chrissy Houlahan and Chris Deluzio — all of them veterans or former intelligence officers — recorded a short video reminding troops of exactly this rule. President Trump, who renewed his push for their prosecution on Thursday, calls what they did sedition and a great violation of the Constitution, and Stephen Miller has called the video a bid for a "color revolution" in the military. The claim from the White House is that telling troops they may refuse illegal orders is an attack on the chain of command itself.
"An order requiring the performance of a military duty or act may be inferred to be lawful, and it is disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate. This inference does not apply to a patently illegal order, such as one that directs the commission of a crime."
The common-sense principle underneath the rule is simple: an order to commit a crime does not become lawful because a superior gave it. If it did, the oath every service member swears to the Constitution would mean nothing, and "I was following orders" would excuse anything — the very defence American prosecutors rejected at Nuremberg and that the military court rejected again in United States v. Calley after My Lai, holding that following orders is no defence when a person of ordinary sense would have known the order was unlawful. The consequence of forgetting that principle is a military in which the person holding the rifle carries all the risk: obey a criminal order and face prosecution for the crime, or refuse it and bet that a judge will later agree it was illegal. That is why the lawmakers' video mattered to the troops who asked for it — and if restating the rulebook can be treated as a crime, the next question writes itself: who is left to stop an illegal order on the day one is actually given?
The details show how far the law and the prosecution push already stand apart. A Washington grand jury refused in February to indict the six lawmakers on the charges U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro sought over the video, and a federal judge has noted the video was "unquestionably protected" by the First Amendment, as Reason reported. The Pentagon's separate effort to censure Kelly, a retired Navy captain, and cut his retirement rank and pay was blocked by U.S. District Judge Richard Leon's preliminary injunction. None of that has ended the push: the president's Thursday post named no new evidence and no specific charge. The law itself also carries a hard edge that the video did not hide — orders are presumed lawful, they are disobeyed at the subordinate's peril, personal conscience or disagreement with policy is no excuse for refusing a lawful order, and whether an order was patently illegal is ultimately decided afterward by a military judge. In the video, Kelly stated the rule in its shortest form, and Deluzio stated its duty:
"Our laws are clear: you can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders."