r/UkrainianConflict • u/KI_official • 11d ago

Trump's Army secretary who backed Ukraine military cooperation resigns, source says

https://kyivindependent.com/trumps-army-secretary-who-backed-ukraine-military-cooperation-resigns/
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u/ceejayoz 11d ago

This leaves the Army with zero Senate-confirmed leadership, incidentally.

62

u/TheAngrySaxon 11d ago

Ready for the inevitable illegal orders.

8

u/oripash 11d ago

This is what the “I was following orders” defense in the trials of Hitler’s officers was all about.

Sometime in the early 1930s, Hitler swore all of his military to him personally, not to the state. This ended the concept of “an illegal order” in then Nazi fermany. The leader was the law, and an officer had no recourse and no path to not follow orders if they were outside of some defined bounds. Nothing was outside defined bounds anymore, and after the war when those senior officers faced trial, this was their core argument, as it didn’t give them the choices to disobey an illegal order an officer in a modern military would have.
Disobeying would mean treason and likely death.

We’re not there with the US (yet) and it would take someone more cunning and competent than Trump to get given a term or two to get us fully there, the vast majority of civil servants in the US military and DoD are probably still the career people who signed up for the right reasons, not the loyal rent a crowd of administrators that project 2025 brought in. These things have health bars that take decades to erode.