The Chain of Command Is Not a Political Toy

The newest political performance from Washington features six Democratic lawmakers staring solemnly into a camera and telling active duty service members that they can refuse illegal orders. The message pretends to be a constitutional reminder, but anyone who has actually served in the national security world knows what it really is. It is an insinuation masked as guidance, a prewritten excuse for the next political fight, and a cowardly attempt to outsource partisan anxiety to the people who would pay the steepest price for guessing wrong. The star of this show is Rep. Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA analyst who now delivers her warnings with the theatrical intensity of someone auditioning for a national security drama she once briefed, but never lived.

For those who did the job for real, Slotkin’s posture is familiar. Analysts often see themselves as shadow directors of the action, narrating the battlefield while others walk into it. Nothing wrong with that, but it does not make you an authority on the chain of command. She tells the intelligence community that no one has to carry out illegal orders, which is true and obvious and already codified in the law, yet she offers no scenario, no statutory context, no criteria, nothing beyond a dramatic pause and a practiced look of concern. A real practitioner would know that telling a young officer to rely on their personal intuition about legality is not guidance. It is sabotage by vagueness. And coming from someone who never had to make operational calls in real time, it rings like a script rather than advice.

The choreography gets worse. Slotkin invokes the Constitution while refusing to attach her claim to a single presidential directive or concrete example. She does not say what orders she thinks are looming or illegal. She does not say how a twenty four year old intelligence officer should evaluate the legality of an instruction under pressure. She simply gestures at danger and lets the audience fill in the blanks. That ambiguity is intentional. It does the political work without requiring political courage. It lets her hint that the commander in chief is preparing to break the law, yet she never has to defend that allegation with evidence. It is informational warfare conducted against her own chain of command, which is something she would recognize if she had ever spent a day running assets instead of studying them.

The lawmakers in the video pretend they are defending the Constitution, yet they are undermining one of the core principles that keeps the military and intelligence community effective. Unity of effort is not optional. When you insert doubt into the system, even as performance art, you create risk. You invite hesitation at the moment when clarity decides outcomes. And you hand a propaganda gift to Beijing and Moscow, who will not bother with context when they clip these messages and broadcast them as proof that America is fracturing from the inside. They do not need to invent stories about American disunity if our own elected officials are willing to film it for them.

Slotkin’s message carries another problem. She offers moral heroism for others to perform. She will not face court martial if an officer misinterprets an order. She will not lose clearance, rank or livelihood. She assumes zero personal risk while urging others to take on all of it. For someone who spent years demanding rigor and precision in intelligence assessments, this kind of sloppy public messaging is astonishing. At the CIA, a junior trainee would be corrected for less. You do not issue a directive without defining terms, outlining authorities, stating the process, and assigning responsibility. You certainly do not give ambiguous ethical instructions to people who operate in an environment where ambiguity already kills.

If the lawmakers truly cared about constitutional guardrails, they would have presented a substantive argument with examples grounded in statute and precedent. They would have identified specific authorities under Title 10, Title 32 or the Insurrection Act and explained how those authorities can be misused. They would have offered procedural guidance and legal channels. They would have shown their work the way the national security community demands. Instead they delivered a mood and a warning and then walked away, knowing that the burden of interpretation now rests entirely on the shoulders of people who cannot afford to guess wrong.

This is not leadership. It is not oversight. It is not patriotism. It is a group of politicians using the credibility of their former service to cast suspicion on the chain of command without the courage to stand behind a clear accusation. They treat the troops like stagehands in a political drama instead of men and women who deserve clarity, discipline and trust. Someone who spent her career writing memos for operators should know better than to play games with the chain of command.

If you want to protect the Constitution, you start by protecting the institutions that defend it. That requires precision, honesty and the courage to say what you mean. Not a vague warning delivered from a comfortable office by someone who once worked at the CIA but never had to make the kind of decisions she is now telling others to second guess.

Slotkin and her colleagues did not issue a civic reminder. They pulled a fire alarm without pointing to smoke. And they expect the firefighters to absorb the blame when the building panics.