In a comment on Does Justice Sotomayor's "Seal Team 6" example, in and of itself, explicitly give the President the authority to execute opponents? If not, why not?, user jesse_b writes, in regard to a hypothetical order to carry out an assassination of a political rival:
as for seal team six only officers would be charged for obeying that order. Enlisted have no obligation nor option to disobey "unlawful" orders.
Is this accurate? Please include relevant citations.
This doesn't exactly answer the question for the US military, but as a former enlisted soldier in the Australian Army, we were explicitly taught during basic training that the "lawful order" requirement applied to us as well. We were expected to only obey lawful orders, and to disobey unlawful ones.
Edit: In his comment below, MacGuffin indicates that he received the same instruction at US Army basic training.
I'm having trouble finding a source that specifically distinguishes between Officers and Enlisted in the US context, so I think it's reasonable to assume that the US Military is similar in this regard to the Australian Defence Force. If there really was a legal requirement for enlisted personnel in the US Military to follow all orders, including illegal ones, then I expect that information would appear very quickly in a simple google search.
This article contains the following quote, which appears to imply that the "lawful order" requirement applies to everyone in the US Military.
It would be palpably illegal to give an order to torture a prisoner. There is no defensible legal argument that interrogation techniques such as waterboarding are permitted. No soldier, sailor, or airman would be in a position to plead ignorance of the law. Any member of the military who received such an order would not just be allowed to disobey it – they would be required to do so.
CAN YOU RECOGNIZE AN UNLAWFUL ORDER?
In the oath that service members take, they pledge to “obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me…” The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) specified that they are required to obey “the lawful orders of his/her superior.”
So you're only required to obey lawful orders. The article then goes on to describe the My Lai massacre during the Viet Nam War as an example of an unlawful order. The Army commander and the men in his command who carried out this order were court martialed for their actions. Their defense was that they were just following the orders from their superiors. But since these orders were "palpably illegal", they should have refused; by obeying the orders, they were committing murder.
Following orders is not a valid defense under certain laws and in certain situations even if the enlisted/officers are required to follow orders by their home country laws.
See for example the failure of the "superior orders" defense during the Nuremberg trials, Adolf Eichmann trial, and other Nazi-related trials; The trials on war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, Congo, others; and local trials (My Lai was mentioned, Kfar Qasim, and more recent examples from Iraq and Ukraine).
In the US military services, both enlisted and officers are required to not follow unlawful orders.
That said, not following illegal orders, in the short-term most likely will not be easy, to say the least.
References:
https://www.mcmilitarylaw.com/articles-of-ucmj/article-92-failure-to-obey-an-order/ https://www.mcmilitarylaw.com/articles-of-ucmj/article-118-murder/
(@Michael, US Army and Australian Army are basically the same on this subject.)
Depends on what you mean by "allowed". I'm not a lawyer of any kind, but I can tell you from experience that while your oath only requires you to follow lawful orders and we were taught the same while enlisted, if you disobey ANY order, lawful or not, you're in for a world of sh**.
How you get handled will heavily depend on the circumstances, like who's prosecuting you and what the order was. For example, an officer ordering you to vote for a particular presidential candidate is unlawful but much different than say, ordering you to drop bombs on your own base during your next sortie. You will likely not go to jail or lose stripes for refusing the latter order and the officer who gave it would likely end up in prison, but the former might earn the officer a reprimand and maybe a small demotion (depending on their record), but you may still receive some retaliation...
Obviously they can't come after you for disobeying the order after that case is settled, but they can and likely will come after you for literally anything else they can conjure up and usually some variation of finding a dereliction of duty in some unrelated context. For example, late for duty, shoddy work, behavior unbecoming of an NCO, etc. they'll find something and there is almost guaranteed to be some regulation they can pin to your chest. No really. I've watched it happen a hundred times. Even saw an NCO lose 3 stripes and had his re-enlistment denied because his wife got a DUI (off base). That has nothing to do with him at all, but they made it stick, and it was in retaliation for refusing an order to work over 14 hours on the flightline stateside (which is a technical order from the DoD which says you're a danger to yourself and everyone around you after 12 hours). This is super common in the Air Force, I'm not sure about other branches.
