Who is the responsible and accountability for orders in situations, where chain of command is wrong. Do, lower command need to perform wrong order by knowing its wrong?

137 views

Who is the responsible and accountability for orders in situations, where chain of command is wrong. Do, lower command need to perform wrong order by knowing its wrong?

In: 0

Anonymous 0 Comments

It depends on multiple factors. But I think in most western militaries there is a concept of an illegal order where soldiers are expected to employ their judgment and to refuse to execute it.

The problem is that during military operations, with the natural fog of war, things are rarely as obvious to the soldiers in the field.

An example of that can be a fire mission that is given to an artillery battery miles away from the target. The people of the battery don’t know, they can’t validate the legitimacy of the target. And it gets targeted and destroyed anyways.

Soldiers can be sent into a tense situation without a proper plan, rules of engagement, or command, and be left making decisions on only partial information, and if that compounds with some visual difficulty, like a broken sightline, fog, darkness, leaves the soldiers with a larger and larger area of uncertainty.

Eventually, yes — in western militaries you have a concept that enables soldiers not to execute an illegal order. But it is fairly rarely that, in combat, the soldiers have a complete enough understanding of a situation, where they can, with perfect reliability, avoid these illegal orders.

So for the soldiers to share responsibility of an illegal command, it must be demonstrated that they had the ability, and indeed realized what they were doing.

A similar thing goes up the chain, at what point a person in a certain position has the information that what is going on is a warcrime.