I wonder why he just now decided an order was illegal? Shouldn’t he have been disobeying all his orders since Obama became CIC?
Maybe he (naively) assumed that by now one of the numerous other lawsuits would have borne fruit and asked the president to show his birth certificate. When it became obvious that wasn't going to happen, he moved forward? (Just speculating.)
If you read his bio, he went to his superiors about this issue and exhausted other options. Its not a new thing that he just ‘decided’ to do this now.
Because an illegal order to fight a war (participate in the killing of others) carries far more punitive legal consequences than other orders. Thus the risk to the officer is far greater.
That's the problem. If you follow his reasoning out to its conclusion, every soldier gets to decide which orders to obey and which not to obey so long as he's in the White House and no court has resolved the birth issue. That can't be the law and it isn't the law.
This guy seems to have had a good record, but I have to wonder why he could follow orders so long as he had a cush assignment in the Pentagon but had a conscience attack when he got deployment orders to the Middle East??