Kim, an aircraft mechanic, joined the military in 2019, at age 18. She and her mother had struggled to survive, even living in their car at times. She didn’t think she could afford college, so she didn’t apply. Like so many young Americans in that situation, she enlisted “to get a stable paycheck, a roof over my head, food in my stomach at the end of the day.” Deployed only once, Kim spent most of her time on base, but she enjoyed the routine: waking up early for 15-hour workdays, staying up late to earn an associate’s degree, making lifelong friends and “amazing mentors.” But in 2024, she began to worry about what a new administration might ask the military to do.
As Kim read Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for Trump’s far-right authoritarian government, she became increasingly troubled about the prospect of unlawful orders, fearing especially that the president would use the military against American civilians. Though she’d been planning on staying 20 years in the Air Force, she decided to get out; now, she’s no longer active duty, but because she didn’t serve a full eight years, she could be redeployed. Kim is not her real name; she spoke anonymously to TNR anonymously so as not to jeopardize her future; a dishonorable discharge could harm her employment prospects and imperil her hard-earned military benefits. “I’ve done quite well for myself,” she told me.
She was right to worry about how Trump might misuse the armed forces. Last month, the Marines were deployed against peaceful protesters in Los Angeles. “And now we have military in our streets,” Kim said, “and that’s not where you’re supposed to see them.” She still fears she could be asked to be party to it.
She’s speaking out as part of a campaign launched by About Face, a veterans’ group which today—July Fourth—is launching a “Right to Refuse” campaign arguing that service members deserve the right to refuse unlawful or immoral orders, in the hope that Congress will pass a law offering stronger protections to service members who do so. Founded by Iraq War veterans concerned about the immorality of that conflict, About Face has in recent years heard from service members with objections to sending weapons to Israel, dismantling DEI within the military, and especially, recently, the prospect of being pawns in Trump’s authoritarian fantasy, whether in the crackdown in Los Angeles or the military parade in Washington, D.C.
Brittany Ramos DeBarros, organizing director of About Face, is an Afghanistan veteran who once faced court-martial for speaking out against that war while still in uniform. She acknowledges that Congress isn’t going to pass this law quickly enough to deal with the current constitutional crises—if at all—but she sees it as a rallying point for military communities. Families and service members need support in trying to navigate this moment, she says, and many are finding each other and organizing. From her own experience, she knows that the military can make you feel crazy if you disagree with it.
“So I think it’s profound,” she said, “that people are organically breaking out of that enough to start talking to each other about, ‘I’m really concerned about this. What are you thinking you’re gonna do?’” DeBarros says many are wondering what is in their own best interests—but also what is the most moral choice: Is it better to resign publicly or “better to have more people within the military when that moment comes who are willing to stand up and do something and do the right thing? Which is a complicated question for people to sit with.” On the one hand, service members risk losing their benefits and going to prison if they refuse orders; but if they don’t refuse unlawful orders, she said, many will “live with the moral injury and consequences of carrying out something that they knew was wrong.”
Laura Dickinson, a law professor at George Washington University with extensive knowledge of the military, national security, and the law of armed conflict, said “the deployment of the federalized National Guard and the Marines to Los Angeles is quite unprecedented and has broken norms in our constitutional tradition. In our tradition, the United States federal government has been very cautious about using the federal military domestically for law enforcement purposes. It’s norm busting and very concerning to people in the military.” Deploying the military against Americans could fracture that trust terribly, Dickinson suggested: “We are seeing concerns about this from within the military now.”
Dickinson points out that the deployment of the Marines and federalized National Guard in Los Angeles—they’re still there—isn’t “manifestly unlawful”; the state of California has been litigating it. DeBarros also noted that “there’s not a clear consensus amongst lawyers around what right now constitutes technically legal orders and what constitutes illegal orders.” But even if a service member faces an obviously unconstitutional order, it’s not clear what she should do. Defying the U.S. military is one of the most intimidating prospects someone can face. Disobedient soldiers can be court-martialed and face prison. Yet if they do carry out unlawful orders, the fact that they were “just following orders” is no defense in a criminal trial. All this puts military personnel in an untenable situation.
Another fear is that Trump might invoke the Insurrection Act—which allows the president to deploy the military if there is unrest “against the authority of the United States”—simply to quash protests. The Marines aren’t trained in policing, DeBarros points out: “Especially people in the military understand that there’s probably no less equipped branch of the federal government to do de-escalation work than the Marines,” who are trained for warfare, where the rules of engagement are very different. Trump fantasized during his first term about shooting protesters in the leg—a prime example, Dickinson notes, of what police are not allowed to do.
“I may not have joined the military out of the most patriotic of reasons,” said Kim, the Air Force member, “but I still raised my right hand and swore an oath to the Constitution to defend it from all enemies foreign and domestic. But the American people are not the Constitution’s domestic enemies.”
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