http://www.gunco.net/forums/showthread.php?t=63774

chain of command

TRX
10-05-2011

Jeff Cooper newsletters

I found this site with a bunch of Jeff Cooper's post-Gunsite newsletters transcribed to HTML. I remember seeing a few of them float by on FIDOnet back in the day.

Cooper always had an opinion on something, but sometimes his blind spots were interesting.

Most of the newsletters were comments on current events. In the November 1995 issue there was this item:

"At Whittington we had a long and thoughtful session about the matter of Spc New, the soldier who maintains that he is not required to fight for the United Nations. The issue here is the most important one that I can recall during my lifetime. Can the Commander-in-Chief of American armed forces order an American fighting man to obey orders issued by a foreign sovereignty? In all the long history of mercenary soldiering it has been accepted that a soldier may indeed fight for a foreign power, but only if he volunteers for that duty. If we follow the example of the Swiss mercenaries of the Renaissance we discover that the contract specifically exempted the soldier from the obligation to fight against his own country. I do not believe any of this has been taken up properly by the lawmen as of yet. A soldier absolutely must do what he is told, but what happens if his foreign commander orders him to fight against his own country?"


It seems strange that someone who served as an officer in both WWII and Korea wouldn't know how this worked. If he served in the Pacific theater, his theater commander was Lord Mountbatten, at least in 1943-1944. Most US troops serving in Australia were under direct authority of local ANZAC officers. Elsewhere, the US/UK Allied command structure was technically "flat", particularly for officers. That joint command lasted a long time, at least through the early 1960s.

More to the point, Korea was a UN action, and all US troops there were technically under UN control. When Cooper served there, he was a "blue hat" and apparently didn't even know it.

And no, a soldier seconded to a foreign power can't be required to fight against his own country. I don't know the official US ruling on that, but it's an accepted article of "civilized warfare" going back several hundred years, at least.

And no, a soldier does NOT "absolutely have to do what he is told." Various United States Supreme Court justices ruled on that in the Nuremberg trials in the late 1940s, backed up by British and French judges. A soldier is required to know and understand the articles of war as accepted by the United States, and it is his *personal* responsibility to see that they are not violated. "Just following orders" didn't get the SS concentration camp guards out of trouble, and it won't get a US soldier out of trouble either.


This isn't an attack on Cooper - Baud knows I have my own blind spots as well - but when you're responsible for people, and may be involved in killing other people, I think you should know what your legal standing is, what your chain of command is, and where your ultimate authority is coming from. Many people don't look more than a couple of rungs up the ladder, and figure nothing above that applies to them. And then they wind up in the situation of, say, many of those agents in the ATF's "Gunrunner" project. "Hey, my boss said to do it. Why are you picking on me?"