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“With the crisis in place, what do you predict will happen next?”

The military is a tribal society. It’s anybody’s guess what will happen, but I think that there must be some high-level scenario discussions going on privately among O-6 to O-10 ranks.

General: “You know the derelict class in ranks will use this to get out of deployment nearly immediately. If we get a rash of this, all hell will break loose.”

General2: “We have officers in missile silos right now with nothing but time on their hands. If a third of those officers buy into this, they won’t launch under orders. Same with sub captains.”

JAG General: “The cases are going to pile up. As it is we have a Major collecting paychecks and benefits, and we can’t order him to attention right now. We can’t discharge him, and ironically, we can’t even rescind the order. Cook’s counsel is likely trying to figure out how to file a motion telling us we don’t even have the authority to rescind our own orders.”

Head of JCS: “Here’s our options:

1. Do nothing and hope we don’t have a rash of officers and enlisted refusing orders. As of yesterday, we can’t even go to court marshall, because the request for documents to the WH will be the same today as it was yesterday.

2. Have a meeting with the President’s people and figure out what the hell’s going on over there. I don’t hold out much hope there, because again, if they had the docs, we wouldn’t be discussing this.

3. Militarily, the goal is getting ourselves out of the middle of this. We could and should stop giving orders. Practically speaking, what is legally defensible are orders designed to protect men and materiel in the field. What is less legally defensible are orders protecting tactical and strategic military objectives in the field. If insurgents decide to invade Baghdad, can we issue orders to intervene at the Iraqi government’s request? Not a chance, not with our people and equipment out of there. Counterattacks? No way. Missile strikes, no. All of that is legally out.

The irony of this is that it neuters the military completely. If we as JCS decide that the national security is at eminent risk, we can arrest the President, and recognize the authority of the Vice President to become President and CINC. How the VP is going to react is anybody’s guess. It won’t solve the problem of re-establishing legal NCA, because half the officers will back the VP, the other half Obama, and I’m not going to debate the percentages because the result is the same - reasonable cause to question the legality of our orders.

It’s going to look, smell, and feel like a coup. If the country is divided now, it will definitely be after we pull something like that. The reaction of Joe Six-Pack is going to be, “So what if he was born in Kenya?” Are you going to explain what Jefferson and Madison’s thinking was on foreign allegiances to explain why the President’s in a military jail?

4. Right now, our orders have the veneer of legality, even if they don’t have the substance of it. We have to make this a political problem again, instead of a military one.

In my view, only the Democrats can make this go away. Between Biden, Clinton, Pelosi, and Reid, you may be able to make them deal with this behind the scenes, allowing Obama to save face somehow on leaving office. No Republican really has the juice to do something about this because, again, it looks, smells, and feels like a coup, and not a legal problem. What we have as leverage is essentially the law - our ability to refuse to issue any more orders, AND their inability to prosecute us for that refusal. We can’t even legally be relieved of command.

We can tell the four of them that as of last night, we got put out of the business of giving orders the chain of command can legally follow, and the good order and discipline that might prevent a sudden stoppage of following orders is only going to last so long. The benefit of this is that its the truth. We can leave that meeting and essentially go on leave until they decide what they want to do.

One thing they COULD do, the four of them, is agree that there is a legal issue, and that the military is following the law, and their oath, and that the military is agreeing to sit this out. To re-establish our authority, they could ask the President to step aside under the 25th amendment until the legality of the National Command Authority under Obama is Constitutionally verified - inventing whatever story they can all stomach. Biden would be President, Major Cook goes to his base (quietly), and Obama can debate the matter, resolve it, fake his way out of it, but the military gets taken out of the middle.

There may/will be a debate about whether Biden is legitimate under the order of succession due to his election on Obama’s ticket, but it won’t be address that matter until Obama provides documents or admits there aren’t any. Still, the military’s ability to issue orders will, until THAT time, be legally re-established.

If Obama’s not a citizen, Biden will likely carry out the duties of the office until at least 2010, so we’d be OK legally until at least then. It’ll take that long for the mess to be properly untangled.

Regardless, if they invoke the 25th, it would be their mess at that point, not ours. I don’t know, and don’t care whether they’d impeach, pardon, etc. Not questions for my paygrade.

I think this last option is the best for obvious reasons. If this turns any more politically partisan than it already is, then we could have an honest-to-goodness mess on our hands that’ll make the collapse of the USSR look like a historical footnote.”

That’s the best I can predict, but you have variations on the basic theme of temporarily getting the military out of the middle of this as soon as possible.

No matter what, you can’t create a situation that requires ALL military memebers to question the legality of issued orders. What would happen then is that the General Officers would have to make an Imperial Romanesque appeal to the troops in the field that the objective now has become withdrawal and extraction - the safety of men and materiel (survival)- and to start planning for the following:

1. Not getting extraction support from Stateside (they refuse to provide extraction on the grounds of not recognizing the general’s legal authority to order withdrawal, even if the purpose is protecting the troops.)

2. Getting extraction support, and then worrying about whether that support is going to include enough inter-service cooperation to not risk being sunk or blown out of the water/air on the way back home (think having to withdraw through Russian airspace or leaving via the Strait of Hormuz).

3. Getting inter-service support, getting home, and then worrying about what to do once they are all back at home. Do we still have the legal authority to pay our own people, feed them, house them? Don’t know.

4. I suspect what would happen in the event of the Russians or Chinese taking a whack at us in such a withdrawal, will be the Military going on full-auto, and the JCS appointing a Supreme Commander on their own until the matter is resolved. That would force the matter to a head within the administration pretty quickly though, and Biden would likely be VP in a heartbeat.

Best I can do. The trick here is getting the military out of the middle of this as soon as possible.