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There are four very important issues here.

1) It is very hard to engage in any political speech in the military, without others interpreting it as partisan in nature. Thus every statement has to include a clear and unambiguous footnote that it is not a partisan group.

2) The second problem is that any non-job related activity will be questioned as to its interference with job performance. The military has a strong attitude that all personnel work for it, alone, 24/7 as needed, which even overrules family obligations. The UCMJ, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, is not about justice, but about “preserving good order and discipline in the military.”

3) Constitutionally, the congress of the United States determines all the ground rules for the military. In World War I, this meant denying the military the vote. It also meant legal segregation. Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution grants Congress the power to make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces, which does not necessarily integrate the Bill of Rights.

4) Any not clearly illegal order given to a member of the US military is assumed to be a legal order. Defiance of a presidential order is therefore regarded as defiance of the entire chain of command leading to that presidential order. Therefore, any resistance to what is believed to be an illegal order inherently accuses the chain of command of complicity in carrying out that illegal order.

This is a pretty grand leap of assumption. Military personnel are not slow to assert the fact, when they believe they have been given an unlawful order, so at the “ground level” it is pretty easy to assume that any order is a legal order.