Not necessarily, the American military operates on chain of command. The worry is the current blocking of military appointments over bullshit. If they can steal long enough trump can install people who will follow his orders. Otherwise you can deny an unlawful order. Trump can only give orders to those ranked immediately below him.
Okay, so hypothetical situation, Trump makes an illegal order to General so-and-so. General refuses to comply. Trump has that General removed and replaced with a sycophant. In this actual case, he’s saying he’ll deploy troops on the ground on American soil, which I don’t believe is an illegal order.
Believe Hayes made it illegal. There a few exclusions though, if I remember correct, an insurrection was one of the exclusions. I imagine Desantis knew this when he stated he would put troops on the other side of the border in Mexico, not realizing that would clearly look/be an invasion of Mexico. Or realizing and being dumb enough to think that was a smart move.
I refused an unlawful order once.
It helped that everyone enlisted immediately agreed, but it escalated up the chain of command very quickly after we asked for a written order until it was agreed that it was a miscommunication and never happened.
To be fair they could order you to do a lot and just hope you do the implied, even verbally said, but unwritten thing. But when I was in we had clear training about what was and wasn’t unlawful to prevent abuse. If we had done it and had no proof we were really 100% officially ordered then it could have been pinned on us. Which is why my first response was, is that an order? Followed with citing the written order that said we could not do that thing and asking for a written order to do the thing. Just following orders works both ways.
For the uninitiated, asking for your verbal orders to be written out or asking for another soldier to be present in the military is a giant red flag. You can’t just say no in most cases. But the sub text is the experienced enlisted soldier knows it’s going to go horribly wrong. It’s generally the last warning an officer gets if they’re doing truly stupid things.
