Refuse and Resign

Our current moment calls for generals with the conscience of Richardson and Ruckelshaus.

Image of the top half of the front page of The New York Times on October 21, 1973, announcing the dismissal of Archibald Cox as Special Watergate prosecutor.

On October 20, 1973, President Richard Nixon ordered the firing of Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor closing in on him over Watergate. Attorney General Elliot Richardson refused and resigned. His deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused and resigned. The act became known as the Saturday Night Massacre, and it destroyed Nixon. What he thought was a decisive strike to protect himself became the moment the country turned on him for good. The resignations of principled men, choosing duty over compliance, lit the fuse.

We are living through something worse. And we need our own Saturday Night Massacre.

President Trump has threatened to bomb Iranian power plants and bridges if Iran does not agree to his terms. Legal experts have been unambiguous: attacking civilian infrastructure that does not contribute to military action is a war crime under international and U.S. law. When a reporter asked Trump directly whether he was concerned about committing a war crime, his answer was: “No. I hope I don’t have to do it.”

“He hopes. That is the standard we are working with now.”

The war began on February 28, 2026, with a surprise U.S.-Israeli attack launched during active nuclear negotiations. The strikes killed Supreme Leader Khamenei, other Iranian officials, and civilians. Subsequent attacks damaged military bases, government facilities, schools, hospitals, and cultural heritage sites. Trump did not seek congressional authorization, just as he has acted unilaterally in other military operations. The administration has offered diverse and changing explanations for starting the war: to pre-empt Iranian retaliation, to ward off an imminent threat, to destroy missile capabilities, to prevent a nuclear weapon, to secure oil resources, and to achieve regime change.

Diverse and changing explanations. No authorization. Civilian infrastructure in the crosshairs.

This is not a war. It is a presidency running hot with unchecked power, and our military is being used as the instrument.

Which brings us to the Joint Chiefs. To the combatant commanders. To the men and women who have spent careers studying the laws of armed conflict, who have sworn an oath to the Constitution, who know very well the difference between a lawful order and a criminal one.

The Uniform Code of Military Justice does not say “follow all orders.” It says follow lawful orders. The distinction matters. Every officer knows it. Every NCO who has ever been through professional military education has sat in a classroom and heard the words: "You are not only permitted to refuse an unlawful order, you are required to.”

We are approaching the moment when that principle ceases to be theoretical.

Trump has told the world he is willing to bomb Iranian power plants. Power plants that heat homes. That run hospitals. That keep water flowing. He said his military will “hit each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously.” He said he wants to bring Iran “back to the stone ages, where they belong.” These are not the words of a commander describing a military objective. They are the words of a man describing collective punishment of a civilian population. That is a war crime. Full stop.

Elliot Richardson saw what Nixon was doing and resigned rather than comply. William Ruckelshaus followed him out the door. History has remembered them well.

Imagine what it would mean if the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the service chiefs, and the combatant commanders looked at a direct order to strike Iranian power grids and said: No. We will not follow this order. It is unlawful. And we resign.

The political earthquake would be unlike anything this country has seen. Not since Nixon has a president suffered the resignation of senior officials over a direct refusal to participate in what they judged to be wrong. But Richardson and Ruckelshaus were civilian appointees. The resignation of uniformed military leadership, the people Trump has paraded as proof of his strength, refusing en masse to follow orders they believe to be criminal, would be a different kind of detonation entirely.

It would signal to the country and the world that the United States military will not be his instrument for atrocity. It would strip away the last of his legitimacy. It would force Congress to act or own the silence.

It would be the Saturday Night Massacre, but with generals.

There is a cost to this, and it would be real. The men and women who chose this path would face consequences. Courts-martial are possible. Trump’s Justice Department would come for them. They know this. The question is whether the moment calls for that kind of courage, and whether they believe, as Richardson and Ruckelshaus believed in 1973, that some things matter more than your position.

Veterans understand this calculus in a way civilians often do not. Military members swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the commander in chief. That distinction is not a technicality. It is the entire foundation of civil-military relations in a republic. The moment the military becomes the personal instrument of one man’s will, unbound by law, unaccountable to Congress, indifferent to the rules of war, something essential has broken.

It has not fully broken yet. There are people in that chain of command who know right from wrong. Who know what the laws of armed conflict require. Those who have spent their careers trying to be something better than what we are being asked to become right now.

History is calling on them to act.

Richardson and Ruckelshaus did not save Nixon’s presidency. They hastened its end. They showed the country that conscience had not entirely abandoned Washington, and they gave the public the clarity it needed to demand accountability.

We need that clarity now. We need senior military leaders to look at unlawful orders and refuse them, publicly, on the record, with their resignations in hand if necessary. Not because it will be easy, or safe, or rewarded in the short term. But because it is what duty requires, because the Constitution demands it, and because the alternative, a military that follows any order from any president regardless of its legality, is not an American military at all.

It would be the most consequential act of conscience in uniform since the founding.

Our generals must act. And they must act now. Or be complicit in Trump’s war crimes.