Killing survivors is not a legal or moral gray area

Over the long weekend, new reporting from the Washington Post indicated that U.S. forces conducting counter-drug operations in the Caribbean have fired second missiles at people who survived an initial strike and were left swimming in the water. Should the reports be confirmed, this would mark a stark departure from long-standing U.S. military practice and from the most basic prohibitions in the laws of war.

If the United States has been firing second missiles at the survivors of its own strikes, we are no longer debating policy. We are describing a nation committing the very acts it once prosecuted others for. We have become what we once condemned.

There is a rule every professional military knows it cannot break: You do not kill people who can no longer fight. This restraint is not because it is merciful or sentimental. You don’t do it because the moment you do, you are no longer engaged in war. You are no longer fighting an enemy. You are killing for the state.

For weeks, the country has argued over legal memos, theories of presidential authority and the semantics of “armed conflict.” All of that obscures a simpler truth. Killing survivors is not a legal gray area, a battlefield innovation or a partisan dispute. It is a war crime. Full stop.

The Geneva Conventions forbid violence against anyone “placed hors de combat,” or “out of the fight.” The Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual restates this without qualification. Section 18.3.2.1 even states, “For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.” Every American service member learns it before deploying. Killing people who are swimming for their lives is not a “disputed framework.” It is the abandonment of law.

In three decades of service, I watched how the institution quietly conditions people for moments like this — not through malice, but through the steady rewarding of compliance and the quiet sidelining of candor. Call it professionalism, call it discipline, call it “good order,” but the result is predictable: By the time a real moral test arrives, most of the system has already learned that silence is the safest choice.

We know that a senior lawyer at U.S. Southern Command raised legal concerns and was sidelined from the process. Silencing a dissenting voice is not the act of a confident military. It is the act of one that knows its actions cannot withstand scrutiny. We know the SOUTHCOM commander, Admiral Alvin Holsey, abruptly announced his retirement amid these operations. While we do not yet know whether he objected, resisted or simply stepped aside — the effect was unmistakable: The last check on illegality disappeared, and the killing continued. That is not professionalism. That is a force conditioned to obey at the moment it most needed to resist.

A second missile does not fire itself. Killing survivors requires the participation or assent of entire layers of command: intelligence analysts, targeteers, pilots, strike cell leads, watch officers, military lawyers, commanders, post-strike assessors. This was not a lone aviator making a catastrophic judgment. This was institutional, and the institution committed a crime.

The cost of this atrocity is suffered by those least empowered to stop it. The moral burden of these acts does not fall on memo-writers in Washington. It falls on the officers and enlisted personnel ordered to carry them out. Young Americans — some barely old enough to drink — will carry this for the rest of their lives. Some will rationalize it. Some will bury it. Some will break under it. A nation that orders its warriors to kill the helpless forfeits the moral standing to ask anything further of them.

Let us also drop the fiction that this is some new legal frontier. It is not. The United States has condemned the extrajudicial killing of suspected drug traffickers in the Philippines. We have condemned regimes that shot the wounded or the drowning. We have denounced dictators who treated suspicion as a license to kill.

Firing on the defenseless is not a gray area or “irregular warfare.” Our uniforms may be cleaner, the legal memos more elaborate, the language more sanitized — but the act is the same. These are war crimes — ordered from the very top of the chain of command. And the consequence is unmistakable: the collapse of the moral credibility of American power.

There must be investigations. There must be consequences — reaching as far up the chain of command as the facts demand. A military that kills the helpless is not operating in a fog of war. It has crossed the final boundary separating a professional force from a system designed to execute, not to think. Once that boundary is breached, there is no such thing as “good order and discipline.” There is only obedience in service of harm.

A nation that orders its service members to kill the defenseless is not being protected by its military. It is morally injuring its warriors, dishonoring the institution they serve and disfiguring itself.

And a nation that tolerates this — without outrage, without accountability, without demanding that it stop immediately — can make no claim to exceptionalism. It has surrendered its soul.

Jon Duffy is a retired Navy captain. His active duty career included command at sea and national security roles. He writes about leadership and democracy.