Garri Hendell: Where Is the Line?
On this side of the line is silent acquiescence, on the other side is refusal. In the middle there is, perhaps, a public articulation of our animating principles.
Growing up was easy. For all my country’s shortfalls—and all the politics that a child of the 1970s and 1980s had to live through—I was always confident that the principles underlying America’s national endeavor were solid. I studied and lived abroad for a time, but when an opportunity came for me to enlist in the U.S. Army a bit later in life, I saw it as an opportunity to not only live out those principles, but as an opportunity to more closely live my values.
Military service has not been without moral and ethical challenges. From my first overseas deployment to the world’s largest detention facility—Iraq’s Camp Bucca—a few years after the Abu Ghraib detainee torture scandal broke, I have always had a very keen focus on what I would and would not be willing to do as part of my military service. The moment I put the lieutenant’s bars on my uniform I knew that I must be prepared to take them off the moment an order I received crossed over that imaginary line between what was good and proper and what was immoral and wrong. This was a duty not only for myself, but in relation to the soldiers I led.
That moment of moral reckoning never happened. I served under such excellent leadership on that deployment and on the deployments that followed that the concerns I developed as a young lieutenant soon faded from my mind. I found that life in the Army, even if not always filled with hearty agreement, was always a place where I could think through right and wrong, advocate for doing what was right, and never feel compelled to do something illegal, immoral, or unethical. I’m not sure I have navigated those waters perfectly, but I have done my best. And it has been a good-faith effort.
Yet the exercise I adopted as a lieutenant—constantly striving to think through where the line between right and wrong was so as to be prepared to act without hesitation—that’s something I never stopped doing. Now this is the question that still weighs on me in an environment where norms and standards are constantly being challenged.
It seems to me that this should be the question that weighs on the souls of all military members in trying times. Furthermore, the obligations of leadership are such that this cannot be a matter for individual, private reflection. We cannot claim to be a thinking profession unless we discuss what everyone must be already thinking: when does my oath to the Constitution interfere with my ability to follow orders?
When the order is unlawful or immoral, the answer to this question is easy and, indeed, the Constitutional analysis is superfluous. We are duty bound to disobey unlawful and immoral orders, no matter the personal cost. More difficult, perhaps, is when an order has the veneer of lawfulness but is, yet, still somehow wrong. Not just an order we disagree with, but an order we know somehow to be wrong on a deeper level.
What immediately comes to mind have been recent directives regarding the scope of permitted military academic inquiry: the “DEI scrub” of Department of Defense webpages and social media, or the well-reported removal of certain books from the U.S. Naval Academy’s library. I suppose the military pilots and personnel moving detained civilians out of the country in defiance of court orders also fall into this category. The potential for military intervention in response to civil disorder is also a potent, recent example.
I have written elsewhere on the professional and personal responsibility we all have to internalize and understand the law of war. I have written elsewhere on the Army as a moral construct and on the importance, perhaps, of articulating the philosophical basis upon which our shared endeavor is based. I have written on the perils of democracy as it relates to armies. Today, I feel I need to write about a much more personal decision: what are we each obliged to do about it?
Like the very important lines on the map that soldiers use to control the movement and maneuver of their units in combat—maneuver graphics such as the “line of departure” at the beginning of the decisive phase of combat or the “limit of advance” past which the unit cannot travel after it has seized its objective—at the very least we need to be constantly determining where the line is, we need to call out the line as we approach it, and we must be prepared to act decisively when we come to it. This cannot be accomplished in silence. Just as all successful operations benefit from a good plan and successful execution cannot be contemplated without some form of rehearsal, intellectual red lines need to be fleshed out on the pages of journals and other professional publications. The obligations of leadership must be discussed openly and honestly and our notion of our responsibilities as members of the profession of arms needs to be formed by reference to the greats of antiquity, the best thinkers among our ranks today, and our own personal moral vision of right and wrong.
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Garri Benjamin Hendell is a lieutenant colonel in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard. He has served three overseas deployments to the CENTCOM AOR, various training deployments to Europe, and served in 2022-2023 as the brigade task force S3 responsible for land forces in support of operations on the U.S.-Mexico border. He is a member of the Society for the Rule of Law.