The Oath Outranks the Office

Those who treat legal oversight as disloyalty are not protecting the republic.

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Editor’s note: This post was originally published on Substack on The Long Watch.

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The Secretary of Defense has dismantled the guardrails that keep military power lawful, accountable, and tethered to the Constitution.

After swearing another oath, this time before the South Carolina Supreme Court on November 17, 2025

I’ve been quiet for a while. Life moved fast: a move, a marriage, organizing, marches, passing the bar, and being sworn in. When I swore an oath before the South Carolina Supreme Court, part of that oath echoed the one I swore in uniform. To support and defend the Constitution. That oath still governs my voice. And it does not permit silence when our senior officials twist that same oath into a weapon.

The catalyst was simple and telling. Secretary Hegseth threatened to call Senator Mark Kelly – a retired Navy Captain, combat pilot, and astronaut – back to active duty for reminding our military that their loyalty is to the Constitution. Recalling a retiree is not a trivial threat. Federal law allows the involuntary recall of certain retired officers, but using that authority to threaten a political opponent undermines both due process and civilian-military norms.

It is a coercive use of authority to punish speech grounded in constitutional duty and further reveals a pattern of hostility to legal oversight.

That hostility took shape in his firing the Army, Navy, and Air Force’s Judge Advocates General whom the Secretary called “roadblocks” to the President. Despite this characterization, JAGs don’t impose rules, build target packages, or make strike decisions. JAGs advise. They are guardrails. Their job is to ensure that military power remains tethered to the law. The point of their firing was not efficiency, but control.

Aside from the obvious downstream effects of treating lawyers as threats for their neutral advice, the fired JAG’s successors were quietly downgraded from three-star to the two-star rank. Senator Lindsey Graham, no stranger to reckless foreign policy, rightly and successfully fought in 2006 to elevate the Judge Advocate Generals to a three-star rank so their legal advice would reach commanders making the hardest decisions. He understood that the line between “enhanced interrogation” and torture, or between a lawful strike and a war crime, is often held together by a single lawyer in the room.

Today, those lawyers are no longer in the room.

The consequences became visible when Secretary Hegseth ordered forces to “kill everybody” after a ship was destroyed, even as survivors clung to wreckage. A strike on unarmed survivors is a war crime under settled law of armed conflict. Our submarine force still speaks about the stranded aircrew and sailors we rescued in WWII. Even President H.W. Bush was saved at sea by a submarine after being shot down.

The submarine community drilled reciprocity for a reason. It was only just a few years ago when our own sailors were captured while drifting into Iranian waters. The norms we break are the norms we lose. By breaking these norms, the Secretary is exposing our sailors to increased danger.

On one of my deployments where teams interdicted vessels suspected of smuggling, nobody killed unarmed civilians. Legal oversight kept us safe and our mission legitimate.

These dangerous patterns are also seen outside of the Pentagon, at the DOJ: sideline oversight, bypass law, punish dissent, and redefine loyalty as obedience to the person in power rather than the Constitution.

The DOJ pressed a trafficking narrative against Kilmar Abrego Garcia without evidence, misled a court, and sustained those false allegations long after they collapsed. A government that misleads its own judiciary and sidelines its legal advisors is not a government seeking justice, but impunity.

Nuremburg settled this eighty years ago: following orders is not a defense if a moral choice is possible. Every officer, enlisted member, and civilian official remains responsible under international law. Chief Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr. showed what fidelity looks like when he landed his helicopter at Mỹ Lai and placed his crew between U.S. soldiers and Vietnamese civilians. He upheld the oath when others abandoned it.

The pattern of hostility is not subtle. The public rationale for many of these high-profile removals has been a rollback of DEI initiatives, but that explanation collapses under scrutiny. The common denominator is independence and refusal to politicize the chain of command (not to mention women and persons of color):

· General Charles Q. Brown, Jr., former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs

· Admiral Lisa Franchetti, former Chief of Naval Operations

· Lt. General Joseph Berger III, former JAG of the Army

· Lt. General Charles Plummer, former JAG of the Air Force

· Rear Admiral Lia Reynolds, former JAG of the Navy

· Admiral Alvin Holsey, former Commander, U.S. Southern Command

· General Timothy Haugh, former Cyber Command chief

· Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield, former U.S. representative to NATO’s military counsel

· Lt. General Jeffrey Kruse, former Director, Defense Intelligence Agency

· General David Allvin, former Air Force Chief of Staff

Admiral Alvin Holsey reportedly raised concerns about operations in his area of responsibility before retiring abruptly after thirty-seven years of service. As one of the Navy’s few Black four-star admirals, his departure is an institutional and historic loss.

Senator Jack Reed, ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, put it plainly, “If you’re going to break the law, the first thing you do is you get rid of the lawyers.” This was a tactic the Nazis used before carrying out the Holocaust. Hundreds of junior judge advocates are being reassigned as immigration judges. This does not expand legal capacity. It further isolates the Department of Defense from the officers responsible for ensuring that their operations comply with domestic and international law.

The Department’s claim that “no lawyer involved questioned the legality of the Caribbean strikes” reads differently once you understand that no military lawyers were in the room.

Former JAG officer Dan Maurer notes in his Lawfare article that Congress has already said –from 10 U.S.C. § 7037 – that judge advocates’ independence, expertise, and advice are essential to all lawful military operations. The Department has not rescinded its Law of War manual, its Law of War program, or the joint doctrine that requires JAGs for targeting, detention, ethics, and operational planning. On paper, the system still knows it needs lawyers. In practice, this administration is doing everything possible to sideline them.

Outside the Governor’s Mansion during the October No Kings Rally

When legal advice is treated as disloyalty and constitutional fidelity becomes grounds for punishment, we are outside the boundaries of healthy civil-military relations.

The law presumes orders to be lawful, but service members have an affirmative defense to when an order is patently unlawful. That standard becomes much tougher to meet when the lawyers charged with advising commanders are removed from the room.