The Lesson, Again: We Look Away When People Are Hors de Combat |
For years, I’ve asked my students a difficult question: What do we owe people who can no longer fight back? What would you do for a wounded soldier reaching for help, or an ejected pilot whose parachute is snagged in a tree? How we treat people at their most vulnerable — wounded, surrendered, or adrift — is the truest test of our ethics, and the events of and since September 2nd show why the answer still matters. The erosion of hors de combat protections—through executive overreach, legal ambiguity, and normalization of extrajudicial force—marks a dangerous collapse of the line between war and crime, and that modern service members now bear a legal and ethical duty to refuse unlawful orders.
I have been teaching ethics, politics, and global issues for over 15 years, including the history of international and humanitarian law. One of the most effective tools I use is the case study Major Knight and Cambodia (Part II), developed by the Center for the Study of Professional Military Ethics. It places students in situations where every choice is uncomfortable, forcing them to ask: “What would I do?”
In discussions with current or former military personnel, the initial answers often seem straightforward — but then they are reminded that the legal protections we take for granted today, including the right to refuse unlawful orders, did not exist at the time. Although United States v. Keenan was decided by the Court of Military Appeals in January 1969, it did little to clarify the position of officers in the field. The decision neither created meaningful legal protection for refusal nor articulated an affirmative duty to disobey unlawful orders. By March 1969, when bombing in Cambodia began, the UCMJ still provided no statutory definition of what constituted an unlawful order, the Manual for Courts-Martial had not yet absorbed the “manifestly unlawful” standard, and no operational doctrine insulated officers from discipline for noncompliance. Major Hal Knight thus operated in a legal landscape marked less by guidance than by ambiguity—one that offered neither clear protection nor a clearly articulated obligation to refuse.
Within that context, the value of humanitarian law and professional ethics becomes tangible. Civilians rarely understand the weight of obligation to the chain of command. At the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Center officers painfully articulated this duty; they told me it can require........