The Removal of Conscience

Classification: ANALYTICAL — FICTIONAL SCENARIO Date: March 2026 Command chains examined: US (Operation Epic Fury) and Israeli (Gaza / joint operations)

Analytical note: This brief applies established international humanitarian law frameworks to documented command decisions and their operational consequences. It is not character assessment. It is legal analysis applied to a fictional scenario using real legal standards. The question it answers is not whether these are bad people. It is whether the documented chain of decisions constitutes criminal liability under the Rome Statute, the Geneva Conventions and customary international law.

Executive Summary

The military institutions of the United States and Israel have systematic institutional mechanisms designed to prevent war crimes: the Judge Advocate General corps, targeting legal advisors, proportionality assessment processes, civilian casualty estimation requirements and command oversight structures. These mechanisms exist because experience has demonstrated that without them military operations produce atrocities.

Both command chains examined in this brief have systematically degraded those mechanisms. The US under Secretary Hegseth has removed institutional oversight, marginalised legal review and installed a command culture in which restraint is framed as weakness. The Israeli command chain under Netanyahu and Gallant has operated with explicit statements of genocidal intent, targeted civilian infrastructure at a scale and pattern that documents the intent, and has used starvation as a deliberate weapon of war.

The central legal argument is simple and does not require proof of the most extreme claims: you cannot assert that you took adequate precautions to minimise civilian casualties when you systematically removed the institutional mechanisms whose function was to ensure adequate precautions were taken. Under the command responsibility doctrine established at Nuremberg and codified in the Rome Statute, the removal of the conscience is itself the crime.

1. The Legal Framework

This brief applies established and codified international humanitarian law. The frameworks are not contested in their general application. Their application to the specific facts documented in this series is the analytical task.

The Foundational Instruments

The Command Responsibility Doctrine

The command responsibility doctrine is the most important legal framework for this analysis. It establishes criminal liability for commanders who do not personally commit war crimes but who bear responsibility for the crimes of forces under their command.

The standard has three elements, established at Nuremberg and codified in Article 28 of the Rome Statute:

• The commander had effective command and control over the forces that committed the crime.

• The commander knew or should have known that the forces were committing or about to commit crimes. The ‘should have known’ standard is critical — it does not require proof that the commander was personally informed. It requires that the information was available and that a reasonable commander would have known.

• The commander failed to take all necessary and reasonable measures within their power to prevent the crimes or to punish the perpetrators.

The removal of institutional oversight mechanisms is relevant to the third element specifically. A commander who removes the people whose function is to prevent crimes and then claims they did not know crimes were occurring has not satisfied the reasonable measures standard. The removal of the oversight is itself evidence of failure to take reasonable measures.

2. The US Command Chain: Hegseth's Pentagon

The specific institutional changes Pete Hegseth has implemented at the Pentagon since January 2025 constitute a documented removal of the oversight architecture that international humanitarian law requires. This is not speculation about intent. It is analysis of documented institutional decisions and their predictable operational consequences.

The JAG Corps: What Was Removed

The Judge Advocate General corps is the military's institutional conscience in a legally precise sense. JAGs are commissioned officers with law degrees whose specific functions in the targeting chain include:

• Reviewing proposed targets for compliance with the distinction requirement — is this a legitimate military objective or a civilian object?

• Conducting proportionality assessments — does the expected military advantage justify the anticipated civilian casualties?

• Advising on precautionary measures — have all feasible steps been taken to minimise civilian harm?

• Providing the legal standing for officers to refuse unlawful orders — the JAG opinion that an order is unlawful is the formal mechanism by which military personnel can refuse without facing court martial.

• Documenting targeting decisions for accountability purposes — the paper trail that enables post-incident review and criminal accountability.

Removing or marginalising JAGs from the targeting chain does not just remove legal advice. It removes the institutional mechanism that the laws of armed conflict require to be present. Article 82 of Additional Protocol I specifically requires that legal advisors be available to advise military commanders on the application of international humanitarian law.

The Documented Institutional Changes

The AI Targeting Dimension

The deployment of AI-assisted targeting systems under degraded oversight conditions is a specific and novel violation of the precautionary principle that deserves precise legal analysis.

Additional Protocol I Article 57 requires that in the planning and execution of attacks, constant care shall be taken to spare the civilian population. Those who plan or decide upon attacks shall take all feasible precautions to verify that objectives are legitimate military targets, choose means and methods that minimise civilian casualties, and refrain from attacks where civilian losses would be excessive.

The specific precautionary failures in the AI targeting system as deployed in Iran:

• Training data from different environments — Gaza, Iraq — applied to an Iranian urban environment without environmental validation. The algorithm's error rate in the specific deployment environment was not established before operational use. That is a failure of the feasible precautions requirement.

• Human approval operating as a formality rather than a substantive review — seconds-level approval of algorithm outputs that require the full distinction and proportionality analysis IHL mandates. The formal presence of a human in the loop does not satisfy the substantive legal requirement.

• IRGC target set embedded in civilian infrastructure by design — the targeting system was deployed against a target set whose defining characteristic is co-location with civilian objects. The algorithm cannot distinguish them. Deploying it anyway is not taking all feasible precautions. It is accepting a known civilian casualty rate as operationally acceptable.

• Removal of JAG review from the targeting chain — the specific oversight mechanism required to catch the failures described above was not present. The school that killed 170 girls during Ramadan is the documented consequence.

Trump: Command Responsibility Analysis

The command responsibility analysis for President Trump does not require proof that he personally ordered the strike on the school or any specific civilian target. It requires analysis of the three Rome Statute Article 28 elements:

• Effective command and control: As Commander in Chief under Article II of the US Constitution, Trump has unambiguous effective command and control over US military forces conducting Operation Epic Fury. He authorised the operation personally on February 27, 2026.

• Knew or should have known: The civilian casualty consequences of deploying AI targeting systems under degraded oversight conditions in a complex urban environment were foreseeable and documented from prior operations. The school incident became publicly known. Trump initially attributed the strike to Iran, later admitted he knew little about it. The ‘should have known’ standard does not require that he read the targeting assessment. It requires that a reasonable commander in his position would have known.

• Failed to take reasonable measures: The institutional degradation that produced the conditions for the school strike was implemented under his administration, by his appointed Secretary of Defense, consistent with his stated preference for military operations without legal and bureaucratic constraint. He did not prevent it. He did not punish it. He attributed it to the adversary and moved on.

3. Hegseth: The Institutional Architect of the Violation

Pete Hegseth's specific criminal liability under command responsibility is more direct than Trump's because his institutional decisions more proximate to the operational outcomes are more documented. He is not the Commander in Chief. He is the civilian official who implemented the specific institutional changes that degraded the oversight architecture.

The legal question for Hegseth under Article 28 is whether his removal of institutional oversight mechanisms constitutes a failure to take all necessary and reasonable measures within his power to prevent war crimes. The answer requires examining what measures were available to him and what he chose to do instead.

The Testosterone Doctrine and Its Legal Consequences

Hegseth's stated philosophy of military leadership — which can reasonably be characterised as the prioritisation of aggression over restraint, the framing of legal and ethical oversight as weakness, the glorification of lethal force as an end in itself — is not merely a personality observation. It has specific legal consequences when implemented as institutional policy in a military command chain.

When the institutional culture of a military organisation systematically frames the exercise of legal judgment as weakness, and when that framing comes from the civilian leadership of the organisation, it constitutes a top-down instruction to the command chain to deprioritise the legal review requirements that IHL mandates. The culture is the policy. The policy produces the outcomes. The commander who installed the culture is responsible for the outcomes.

4. The Israeli Command Chain: Gaza and the Joint Operation

The Israeli command chain analysis covers two distinct but connected operational contexts: the Gaza operation that preceded and provides the permission structure for Epic Fury, and the joint US-Israeli operation of Epic Fury itself. Both are relevant because the joint operation structure means that command responsibility analysis must address both chains and their interaction.

The Legal Basis for the Analysis

Israel has ratified the Geneva Conventions. Israel's domestic legal framework incorporates IHL obligations. The Israeli Supreme Court has applied IHL in numerous cases involving military operations. The Israeli military has its own Military Advocate General corps with functions equivalent to the US JAG corps. The legal standards applicable to Israeli military operations are not contested in their general application.

Israel has not ratified the Rome Statute. However, the ICC has jurisdiction over crimes committed in the territory of Palestine, which is a member state. The ICC prosecutor's filing of warrant applications for Netanyahu and Gallant in May 2024 establishes the institutional assessment that there is sufficient evidence to support criminal charges. This brief applies the same legal framework independently.

The Stated Intent: A Legal Document

In the context of command responsibility, the public statements of military and political leaders are not merely rhetorical. They are evidence of the mental element required for the most serious charges — genocide and intentional attacks on civilians. The statements documented in Brief 007 are reproduced here in their legal context:

The Operational Evidence in Legal Context

The operational evidence documented in Briefs 003, 004 and 007 is reproduced here in its legal framework. The question for each element is whether the acts described constitute violations of specific IHL provisions and whether the command chain bears responsibility for them.

Netanyahu: Command Responsibility Analysis

The Netanyahu command responsibility analysis applies the same three-element Rome Statute Article 28 framework:

• Effective command and control: Netanyahu is Prime Minister and is directly involved in operational military decisions as documented by his own statements, his addresses to troops, and the War Cabinet structure. The military operates under civilian command. He has effective control.

• Knew or should have known: Netanyahu was personally briefed on operational developments. The civilian casualty scale was publicly reported, UN-documented and submitted to the ICJ. The statements of his own cabinet ministers about the explicit intent to destroy civilian infrastructure and block aid were made in public. The ‘should have known’ standard is comprehensively satisfied. The ‘knew’ standard is almost certainly satisfied given the briefing structure of a wartime prime minister.

• Failed to prevent or punish: No adequate investigation of the flour massacre. No punishment of perpetrators of hospital raids. No disavowal of cabinet minister statements endorsing starvation and total destruction. No reduction of operations following ICJ provisional measures orders. The failure to prevent and punish is documented across the entire duration of the Gaza operation.

Gallant: The Proximate Commander

Gallant's command responsibility is more proximate than Netanyahu's because the human animals statement establishes his personal mental element with a clarity that removes the ambiguity that might exist for more distant commanders. He made the statement two days before the ground operation, to which he was the operational commander. He is the commander who authorised operations that produced the documented outcomes under a stated framework of fighting human animals.

The Rome Statute does not require that Gallant personally ordered every specific act. It requires that he knew or should have known, failed to prevent and failed to punish. The human animals statement is not merely evidence of genocidal intent for the genocide charge. It is evidence of the command culture within which orders were given, received and interpreted by the forces under his command. A force that has been told by its operational commander that it is fighting human animals will interpret ambiguous operational orders in that frame. The frame is Gallant's creation.

5. The Joint Operation Dimension

Operation Epic Fury is a joint US-Israeli operation. The joint operation structure creates a specific set of command responsibility questions that do not arise in single-nation operations. When two command chains conduct joint operations and one or both commit war crimes, the question of cross-command responsibility requires analysis.

What the Joint Operation Structure Creates

• Shared intelligence: The joint operation involves intelligence sharing between the US and Israeli military establishments. Intelligence provided by one partner that enables strikes by the other creates potential aiding and abetting liability under the Rome Statute even for acts committed by the other partner.

• Shared targeting: Where US and Israeli forces conduct coordinated strikes against shared target sets, the targeting decisions are jointly owned. The US JAG analysis — or its absence — applies to the joint targeting process. Israeli Military Advocate General review — or its absence — similarly.

• Mutual knowledge of criminal conduct: The Gaza civilian casualty record was publicly documented and known to the US government before Epic Fury was launched. Entering a joint operation with a partner whose command chain has ongoing ICC warrant applications and ICJ provisional measures orders against it, without conditioning the partnership on compliance with those orders, creates potential criminal liability for the US command chain as well.

• The school: The US military believes the school was struck by a US Tomahawk missile. In a joint operation context, questions of whether Israeli targeting intelligence, US weapons systems and joint operational planning contributed to the strike require investigation across both command chains.

5b. The Abdication of the Officer Corps

The command responsibility analysis does not stop at the civilian leadership. It extends to the senior military officers who knew or should have known and failed to act.

Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Nuremberg principles, US military personnel have not just the right but the obligation to refuse unlawful orders. The JAG opinion that an order is unlawful is the formal mechanism that gives an officer legal standing to refuse without facing court martial. When JAGs are removed from the targeting chain, that protection disappears. The officer who raises a legal objection without JAG backing is professionally exposed. The institutional removal of conscience creates the conditions in which individual conscience becomes professionally dangerous.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the service chiefs, the combatant commanders — none have publicly raised legal objections to the operational parameters. That silence is itself a command responsibility question. Senior officers who knew or should have known that the targeting architecture was producing civilian casualties at a scale inconsistent with IHL requirements, and who failed to object, report or refuse, are potentially liable under the same Article 28 framework applied to the civilian leadership.

The specific officers whose legal review functions were removed or marginalised are potentially witnesses in any future accountability proceeding. Their silence, whether compelled or voluntary, is part of the institutional record. The removal of the conscience was not anonymous. It had names and dates and institutional decisions attached to it.

The legal obligation is reinforced by something deeper: the professional formation every US officer received. West Point, Annapolis, the Air Force Academy, the Coast Guard Academy — all teach honour codes and professional ethics curricula that explicitly address the obligation to refuse unlawful orders, the primacy of the Constitution over the chain of command, and the individual officer's moral responsibility for the consequences of orders followed without question.

The Nuremberg defence — "I was following orders" — is not just prohibited under the UCMJ. It is specifically taught at every US service academy as the foundational lesson of what professional military ethics exists to prevent. West Point's motto is Duty, Honour, Country — in that order. Duty to the Constitution and to the laws of armed conflict comes before loyalty to a chain of command issuing unlawful orders. That sequencing is not incidental. It is the entire point.

Every senior officer who has remained silent went through that formation. They learned those lessons. They took those oaths. The ethos of the officer corps is not a political position — it is a professional standard that exists precisely to be immutable above politics. The silence of the officer corps in the face of documented IHL violations is therefore not merely a legal failure. It is a failure of professional identity. The institution is being asked to be something its own formation says it must never become.

The gap between the legal analysis in this brief and the probability of enforcement is real, wide and must be acknowledged honestly. Acknowledging it does not make the legal analysis less correct. It makes it more important.

Why Enforcement Is Improbable

• The United States has not ratified the Rome Statute and disputes ICC jurisdiction over US nationals. The Biden administration partially reversed Trump's first-term hostility to the ICC. The current administration has been explicitly and aggressively hostile. US cooperation with any ICC investigation of US military personnel is not forthcoming.

• Israel has not ratified the Rome Statute. Its cooperation with ICC proceedings against its own officials is not forthcoming. The US has blocked UN Security Council referrals that would have strengthened the ICC's jurisdictional basis.

• The Putin precedent demonstrates the limits of ICC warrants against sitting heads of government with nuclear arsenals and great power protectors. The warrant exists. He has not been arrested. The practical enforcement mechanism requires states willing to arrest, and states willing to prioritise the arrest over bilateral relationships with the person being arrested.

• Domestic accountability in the US requires Congressional action, Department of Justice investigation or military justice proceedings. The political conditions for any of these are not present in the current environment. The culture Hegseth has installed at the Pentagon actively suppresses the internal accountability mechanisms that might otherwise function.

Why the Analysis Is Required Regardless

The Nuremberg prosecutors did not wait for a court to confirm that the Holocaust had happened before they named it and built the legal case. They named it because the evidence was in front of them and the obligation to name it was the obligation the evidence created. The legal analysis this brief presents is not contingent on enforcement. It is contingent on the evidence.

There are specific consequences of the legal analysis that operate independently of formal prosecution:

• Travel constraints: ICC warrant holders face arrest if they travel to states willing to enforce. Netanyahu's international travel has already been affected. The US command chain's exposure creates similar constraints as the warrant applications proceed.

• Arms embargo obligations: States party to the Genocide Convention have legal obligations not to facilitate genocide. The ICJ provisional measures orders create specific legal obligations on states providing arms to Israel. Several states have acted on these obligations. More may follow as the Epic Fury evidence accumulates.

• Diplomatic isolation: The legal exposure creates diplomatic consequences that operate through normal state-to-state relationships. Countries that would otherwise engage bilaterally factor the legal exposure into their relationship calculations.

• Historical record: The legal analysis creates a documented record that outlasts the political conditions that prevent immediate enforcement. Pinochet was arrested 25 years after his crimes. The accountability architecture built around these events will outlast the political protection that currently prevents enforcement.

• Deterrence of future conduct: The most important function of the legal analysis is prospective. Every future commander who reads this analysis, or analyses like it, receives information about the legal consequences of removing institutional oversight mechanisms. That information changes behaviour at the margin. At the margin is where the school gets prevented.

7. The My Lai Precedent and Its Application

The My Lai massacre of March 16, 1968 — in which US forces killed between 347 and 504 Vietnamese civilians — is the most important US military precedent for the command responsibility analysis in this brief. Its relevance extends beyond the specific facts to the institutional lessons drawn from it and subsequently applied or abandoned.

What My Lai Established

• Command responsibility applies up the chain. Lieutenant William Calley was convicted of murder. Captain Ernest Medina was acquitted on contested evidence of knowledge. The investigation went up the chain to Major General Samuel Koster, who was demoted. The principle that command responsibility extends up the chain was established even if the prosecutions at higher levels were inadequate.

• The ‘following orders’ defence does not work. Calley's defence that he was following orders from Captain Medina did not prevail. The Nuremberg principle that individuals bear criminal responsibility regardless of superior orders is operative in US military law.

• Cover-up is a separate crime. The systematic suppression of information about My Lai for more than a year by multiple levels of the command chain produced additional criminal and disciplinary proceedings. The cover-up liability is relevant to Hegseth's active suppression of civilian casualty reporting.

• The institutional response matters as much as the legal proceedings. The military's response to My Lai produced the Law of War Programme, enhanced JAG training, and the doctrine of individual soldiers' obligation to refuse unlawful orders. Those institutional responses were the operational legacy of My Lai that made US forces less likely to commit similar atrocities in subsequent decades.

Hegseth's Pentagon has systematically dismantled the institutional legacy of My Lai. The Law of War training that My Lai produced. The JAG oversight architecture that My Lai motivated. The command culture in which legal and ethical review was a professional obligation rather than a bureaucratic impediment. The institutional memory of what happens when those mechanisms are absent.

8. Bottom Line Assessment

The command responsibility analysis of this brief produces findings across both command chains that are legally supportable under established international humanitarian law standards. They are stated here as the analytical conclusions the evidence requires, not as advocacy or polemic.

— END OF BRIEF —

Operation Epic Fury is a fictional analytical scenario. The legal frameworks applied are real. The evidence cited is documented. The accountability architecture exists and does not expire.