Every order doesn't depend on the President. Larkin disobeyed an order to report to a commanding officer's office. Is it your contention that nobody in the military can issue even the most trivial order until they see Obama's birth certificate? Because that's obvious nonsense.
>>”Question: From whence does an officer gain his authority to issue a command to a soldier?”
>
>Every order doesn’t depend on the President. Larkin disobeyed an order to report to a commanding officer’s office. Is it your contention that nobody in the military can issue even the most trivial order until they see Obama’s birth certificate? Because that’s obvious nonsense.
Nope, it’s NOT. It’s the logical result of a completely invalidated chain-of-command; though there is technically a higher [legal & authoritative] entity than ‘President’: The Constitution of the United States of America. Any order contrary to it is, by definition of “supreme law of the land,” contrary to the law (and therefore illegal). Conversely, no order affirming it can be held to be illegal (i.e. legally speaking if a “Captain” issued an order to his men [say during Katrina] that they were under no circumstance, except as a response to violence, disarm a citizen it would be legal... EVEN IF the standard ‘operating procedure’ *ordered* by the Officer in Charge of the mission stated that they were to disarm citizens).
Let me present a scenario to you: a small unit of soldiers are out on patrol while their parent-unit is attacked and utterly destroyed, then a counterattack happens [by the parent-unit’s parent unit] and the enemy is expelled from that position, at this time the patrol returns. It is entirely possible the commander [of the ‘grandparent’ unit] could have, in the absence of its child unit, filled those positions including that of the commander for that small unit’s parent unit... perhaps with soldiers unknown to the original small-unit.
Now, what assurance do the returning soldiers have that this new commander is legitimate?
Now, what if that grand-parent unit left but kept the replacement of the parent unit in place to secure the point? What assurance would the patrol have that this entirely new replacement unit was legitimate?