California Law Review VOL. 86 OCTOBER 1998 No. 5 Copyright © 1998 by California Law Review, Inc. Obeying Orders: Atrocity, Military Discipline, and the Law of War Mark J. Osielt TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ..................................................................................... 944 General Background ......................................................................... 946 A. Genealogy of Terms ............................................................. 951 B. "Cracking the Culture" of the "Separate Community" ...... 953 C. Civilian and Military Approaches to Legal Error ................... 959 D. Current Law as Compromise ................................................. 961 E. Why Ever Excuse Obedience to Illegal Orders? ............ .. .......965 I. Obedience to Superior Orders: The Uncertain Scope of Manifest Illegality ....................................................................... 969 A. The Nature of the Defense .................................................... 971 Copyright © 1998 California Law Review, Inc. t Mark J. Osiel, Professor of Law, University of Iowa. J.D., Ph.D., Harvard University, 1987. For their helpful comments, I would like to thank Steven Burton, Eliot A. Cohen, Mary Dudziak, Sir Michael Howard, Kenneth Kress, Col. Howard Levie, Lt. Col. Mark Martins, John Norton Moore, Maj. Gen. A.P.V. Rogers, Tina Rosenberg, Col. Scott Silliman, Robert F. Turner, Detlev Vagts, Lea Vandervelde, and the participants in faculty seminars at Stanford and the University of Iowa. Conversations with several leading Judge Advocate General (hereinafter JAG) officers and civilian Defense Department lawyers, whose anonymity must be preserved, proved invaluable. Discussions with Carlos Nino and Jaime Malamud-Goti, while they were prosecuting officers for crimes arising from Argentina's "dirty war," were also very helpful. I am grateful to several members of legal academia who were willing, on condition of anonymity, to share some rather unflattering tales of their own military activities during World War II and the Korean War. Special thanks, as always, to Eliza Willis. The Iowa Law Foundation provided generous financial support. A larger version of the present study will appear shortly as a book, with the same title. The reader of the present Article will, of course, find all of her doubts, criticisms, and disagreements fully addressed in the larger work. CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 86:939 1. National vs. International Law ......................................... 971 2. What Makes an Order "Manifestly" Illegal? .................. 973 3. "Manifestly Illegal" to Whom? ...................... ........ .... .. .. 975 4. Why and When Legal Errors Must Be Reasonable ........... 976 B. Legal Uncertainty ................................................................. 978 1. How Legal Uncertainty Erodes the Manifestness of Illegality .................................................................... 978 2. Soldiers' Conflicting Duties under Municipal and International Law ............................................................ 980 3. Conflicting Principles within Military Law ...................... 986 4. Perverse Incentives for Legal Stagnation ......................... 991 C. Practical Sources of Uncertainty ........................................... 993 1. Moral Gravity as a Source of Manifest Illegality ............. 993 2. Procedural Irregularity as a Source of Manifest Illegality ......................................................................... 997 3. Eliminating "Manifestness" by Redescription .............. 1000 4. Atrocities as Ultra Vires ................................................ 1003 D. Theoretical Sources of Uncertainty ..................................... 1008 1. Positivist and Natural Law Approaches to Manifest Illegality ....................................................................... 1008 2. Postmodernist Challenges ............................................... 1010 E. Attributional Uncertainty .................................................... 1012 1. How Totalitarianism Erodes the "Manifest" Illegality of A trocity .................................................................... 1013 2. How "Many Hands" Weaken Manifest Illegality .......... 1017 II. Averting Atrocity: A Sociology of Military Law ...................... 1020 A . Introduction ....................................................................... 1020 1. Military Virtues Internal to the Calling .......................... 1023 2. Rival Views on the Legal Structure of Armed Forces ..... 1025 3. Morality vs. Efficacy: A False Dichotomy .................... 1027 B. Sources of Atrocity, Responses to Atrocity .......................... 1028 1. Atrocity as Primordial Passion ...................................... 1029 Response: Discipline through Bureaucracy .................. 1031 2. Atrocity by Bureaucracy ............................................... 1032 Response: Discipline Through Democracy ................... 1033 3. Atrocity by Connivance ................................................ 1037 Response: Command Responsibility ............................. 1040 4. Atrocity by Brutalization .............................................. 1041 Response: Civilianize Military Law ............................... 1044 C. W hy M en Fight ................................................................... 1045 1. For Class H onor ............................................................ 1045 2. For God and Country ................................................... 1047 1998] OBEYING ORDERS 3. To Prove One's Self: Discipline in a Postmodernist K ey .............................................................................. 1050 4. For Comrades in Arms .................................................. 1053 D. Morale and Morality ........................................................... 1058 E. Bases of Resistance to Unlawful Orders ............................... 1061 III. Rules versus Standards in Military Law ..................................... 1063 A. Promoting Practical Judgment ............................................ 1065 1. Martial Courage as Moral Judgment ............................. 1071 2. Information Warfare and the Legal Structure of Armies1087 3. Two Ways to Prohibit War Crimes ................................. 1089 4. Training, Conduct Rules, and Decision Rules ................ 1095 B. Misreading Orders Morally ................................................. 1098 1. Ambiguous Orders and the Common Soldier ............... 1099 2. Giving Orders by Hints, Intimation, and Suggestions ..... 1104 3. The Duty to Seek Clarification and Written Reiteration .1106 4. Disobedience as Creative "Compliance" ..................... 1108 5. Atrocity from Above, Resistance from Below ................ 1110 6. Atrocity from Below ..................................................... 1111 7. The Impact of Legal Advice on the Reasonableness of Client Error .............................................................. 1118 C . C ases .................................................................................. 112 1 C onclusion ..................................................................................... 1125 CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 86:939 1998] OBEYING ORDERS Obeying Orders: Atrocity, Military Discipline, and the Law of War Mark J. Osiel The law now generally excuses soldiers who obey a superior's criminal order unless its illegality would be immediately obvious to anyone on its face. Such illegality is "manifest, " on account of its pro- cedural irregularity, its moral gravity, and the clarity of the legal pro- hibition it violates. These criteria, however, often conflict with one another, are over- and underinclusive, and vulnerable to frequent changes in methods of warfare. Though sources of atrocity are shown to be highly variable, these variations display recurrentpatterns, indicat- ing corresponding legal norms best suited to prevention. There are also discernible connections, that the law can better exploit, between what makes men willing to fight ethically and what makes them willing to fight at all. Specifically, obedience to life-threateningorders springs less from habits of automatism than from soldiers' informal loyalties to combat buddies, whose disapproval they fear. Except at the very lowest levels, efficacy in combat similarly depends more on tactical imagina- tion than immediate, letter-perfect adherence to orders. To foster such practicaljudgment in the field, military law should rely more on general standards than the bright-line rules it has favored in this area.A stringent duty to disobey all unlawful orders, coupled to a standard-like excuse for reasonable errors, would foster greater diso- bedience to criminal orders. It would encourage a more fine-grained attentiveness to soldiers' actual situations. It would thereby enable many to identify a superior's order as unlawful, under the circum- stances, in situations where unlawfulness may not be immediately and facially obvious to all. This approach aims to prevent atrocity less by increased threat of ex post punishment, than by ex ante revisions in the legal structure of military life. It contributes to "civilianizing" military law while nonetheless building upon virtues already internal to the sol- dier's calling. In developing these conclusions, the author draws evi- dence from a wide array of recent wars andpeacekeeping missions. CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 86:939 INTRODUCTION A soldier