Dan Tully: I trust my fellow service members will abide by the Constitution

Chicago Tribune

23-06-2025

Having served as a captain and judge advocate in the Army Reserve, graduated from Stanford Law School and deployed overseas in Iraq, I have thought deeply about military command and the obligations incurred by swearing an oath to the Constitution. These concerns weigh especially heavily as President Donald Trump deploys active-duty military members as a show of force against peaceful demonstrations in Los Angeles and potentially here in Chicago.
I want my fellow citizens to know something important. I trust the common sense and decency of my fellow American service members. I have served alongside them, some who consider themselves to be MAGA Republicans. I know they understand how grave and serious it would be to use force against their countrymen and countrywomen.
Let me explain why.
All service members swear an oath to 'support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.' Enlisted service members continue swearing to 'obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me,' expressly conditioned by, 'according to the regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).' With that condition, the enlisted oath is not absolute; if an order is unlawful, an enlisted service member is responsible not to obey.
The obedience language is absent from the officer oath. Instead, officers swear to 'well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.' In short, while all members of the military must act in accordance with the UCMJ, each officer must exercise an even higher level of responsibility, remaining loyal not to a president but to the Constitution. No service member should ever follow a clearly unlawful command, especially when that command is to harm unarmed, peaceful citizens of their own country.
It is infuriating that we are even in this situation. Trump doesn't care about members of the military, referring to fallen soldiers as 'suckers' and 'losers' for not escaping their obligations as he did during the Vietnam War. He denigrates the records of patriots such as the late U.S. Sen. John McCain, degrading his war hero status. He has saddled them with an incompetent secretary of defense in Pete Hegseth. Most dangerously, Trump intentionally disregards centuries of the military's most essential tradition of nonpartisanship, eroding American faith in our most trusted institution.
What troubles many of us in the military — something I would advise my fellow soldiers and commanders to consider — is the terrifying prospect of an unlawful order coming down from this reckless president. Trump has openly mused about service members using lethal force to control protesters, portraying them as domestic enemies of the Constitution. In fact, it's the opposite: The protesters are exercising their First Amendment right to free speech and assembly in support of the 14th Amendment rights of people being kidnapped and deported without due process.
To the extent that there have been acts of violence and vandalism in the vicinity of the protests, those acts are unlawful. Police in our cities are fully capable of addressing the situation. Protests — even ones that include civil disobedience — should not be met with violence unless there is no other option available. But this president believes violence against our citizens is an acceptable first choice because he doesn't value the rule of law or, by his own admission, his duty to uphold our Constitution.
American military members are trained and proficient at understanding the conditions under which it is lawful to use force in the heat and exercise of war. They are taught to obey the chain of command, especially on a battlefield. Unit cohesion and effectiveness depend on the obedience of orders.
But a service member is not a robot, blindly obligated to fulfill a command received from a superior with no application of context or thought. Especially if that command is given outside the theater of war, with no imminent danger to personnel, and even more so when present on the streets of an American city where the people those soldiers swore to defend are petitioning the actions of their government.
American soldiers have misused lethal force in the past, and they have faced consequences. Second Lt. William L. Calley Jr. was convicted by court martial of the premeditated murder of 22 Vietnamese in the famous My Lai massacre. He was convicted because the threshold for disobeying an order is, according to the Manual for Military Courts-Martial and case law, 'a person of ordinary sense and understanding would have known the orders to be unlawful.'
With a president so intent on sowing chaos every day, it must be a difficult position for the American troops who have deployed to Los Angeles and are rumored to be on their way to other cities. But Americans stand up to do what's right in difficult moments all the time.
We must not forget that there are numerous institutions available to us all to safeguard our rights. Our military, state and federal criminal justice systems are populated with true patriots who believe in the rule of law.
This is, ultimately, why I trust that our service members will do the right thing when the time comes. They have been trained well, and they know their obligations to their country.
I have sworn an oath to the Constitution three times — as a lawyer, an Army officer and a federal civil servant.
The Constitution is not a suggestion; it is the supreme law of the land. Even if our president won't abide by it, I trust my fellow service members will.