Donald Trump’s threats to launch massive strikes on Iran’s civilian infrastructure leave American service members facing a stark choice—obey the order or refuse to take part in what could amount to war crimes.
For the US chain of command, this is a matter demanding an immediate answer. In blunt terms, he set a deadline—Tuesday, 8 p.m. Washington time—demanding that Iran open the Strait of Hormuz, or else, as he put it, there would be “power plant day and bridge day—all at once.”
On Sunday, he wrote on his Truth Social platform: “You haven’t seen anything like it yet!!! Open the fucking strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell.”
Three days earlier, the president made clear what he meant by “power plant day.” “We are going to hit every one of their electric generating plants very hard—probably simultaneously,” he said in prepared remarks later amplified by State Department social media accounts.
Legal experts broadly agree that such an attack on infrastructure sustaining the lives of 93 million Iranians would be classified as a war crime.
“Such statements—if followed by action—would amount to the gravest war crimes and place service members in an extraordinarily difficult position,” former US military lawyers Margaret Donovan and Rachel VanLandingham wrote on the Just Security website.
“As former military lawyers who advised on targeting, we understand that the president’s words run counter to decades of military legal training and could set troops on a path of no return,” they noted.
They also said Trump’s promises to “bomb Iran back to the Stone Age” and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s instruction to act “without pity and without mercy” are not only “patently unlawful,” but also mark a break with the moral and legal principles troops have been taught throughout their service.
Charlie Carpenter, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, noted that history offers many cases in which service members questioned orders, refused to carry them out, or even intervened to prevent crimes. As one example, she cited US Army personnel who refused to take part in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968, including a helicopter pilot who threatened to open fire on his own side.
At trial, the officer who ordered the killing of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians, Second Lieutenant William Calley, argued that he had merely been following orders. The court rejected that defense, ruling that such orders were “patently unlawful.”
The question now is whether officers ordered to bomb Iranian power plants and bridges could credibly claim they did not recognize the “patent unlawfulness” of such an order.
When Democrats in Congress released a video message to service members in November reminding them, “You can refuse an unlawful order, you are required to refuse an unlawful order,” Trump responded on Truth Social by accusing them of “mutinous behavior punishable by death.”
“There are many factors that make it difficult to say no or stop war crimes—especially in situations where there is legal uncertainty,” Carpenter said. “The law requires service members to disobey only ‘manifestly unlawful’ orders—those whose illegality would be obvious to any reasonable person.”
“But that skill and moral judgment are not drilled in the same way as obedience and unit cohesion,” she added. “And disobedience can still lead to court-martial if it later turns out the judgment was wrong.”
Since taking office, Hegseth has made legal guidance harder for commanders to access by firing the Pentagon’s top military lawyers and dismantling the civilian harm mitigation office created under the Biden administration. For rank-and-file troops, the last resort is the “GI Rights Hotline,” and reports say the number of such calls has risen sharply under the Trump administration.
A study led by Carpenter last year found that most service members are capable of distinguishing lawful orders from unlawful ones.
“Most understand their duty to refuse an unlawful order and can give concrete examples,” she said. “But recognizing such a moment in real time and acting accordingly is harder than answering a survey. What we do know is this: once one person steps forward, it becomes easier for others to follow.”
In recent days, Trump has escalated his rhetoric, telling an ABC journalist that if Iran does not meet his demands, “we will blow up the whole country.”
Asked whether there were any limits, he replied: “Hardly any.”
The ferocity of these statements, combined with a growing desire to find a way out of the conflict, is deepening fears that the unpredictable president might contemplate the use of nuclear weapons.
Under the American system, the president holds the sole authority to order a nuclear strike. An emergency conference is convened with the National Military Command Center, where the defense secretary and senior military leadership are typically present—depending on who is available at the time.
The military aide who remains constantly at the president’s side opens the so-called “nuclear football,” which contains strike options and the authentication codes confirming presidential authority.
The only way to stop such an order is to have it declared unlawful somewhere along the chain of command.
In January 2021, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, reportedly alarmed by Trump’s unpredictability, insisted on being involved in any decisions related to nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons expert Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies said Trump had previously shown some understanding of the devastating consequences of using nuclear weapons, but added: “I don’t know how much of that understanding remains when he is both losing a war and losing his composure.”
In his 2018 book The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States, Lewis described a scenario in which Trump starts a war by mistake. In one episode, the aide responsible for the “nuclear football” tries to stop the president from gaining access to it and is ultimately punished.
Asked whether there is any confidence that someone in the chain of command could stop Trump now, Lewis answered bluntly: “None.”
“He has systematically removed from the military anyone he believed might stand up to him or resist him,” he said.