Judging Freedom - Jim Webb : Can Troops Disobey Illegal Orders?

Episode Date: July 27, 2026

Jim Webb : Can Troops Disobey Illegal Orders?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Undeclared wars are commonplace. Pragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression with no complaints from the American people. Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected. What if sometimes to love your country you had to alter or abolish the government? the government. What if Jefferson was right? What if that government is best, which governs least? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now?

Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom. Today is Tuesday, July 27, 26. Jim Webb is back with us on this intriguing question. He'll be here in just a moment. Can troops disobey illegal orders? Well, we know they can. Will they? But first, this. Today's headlines aren't just bleak. They're an indictment of a government that has abandoned the Constitution. You are witnessing the direct result of the Federal Reserve's relentless war on the value of your dollar. For centuries, gold and silver. have been the ultimate shield against the state's favorite tools. Monetary expansion and runaway inflation.

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Call 800, 5114620 to see if you qualify for up to $20,000 in bonus medals. That's 800,5114620 or go to Learjudgeonap.com. Jim Webb, welcome here. Welcome back, my dear friend. Yeah. So many of us enjoyed the conversation we had last week on this idea about troops disobeying illegal orders, which was around a few months ago, popped up into my head over the weekend. But before we get there to your general views on Iran, why do you suppose President Trump, after threatening in the middle of last week to visit the gates of hell on the Iranian people, decided, Not only not to ramp up the attacks, but to dial them back completely over the weekend.

I think it's pretty simple, Judge. There's two, well, I would say there's three factors to this. One is this consistent loop we have now established where whenever the markets get set to open, he brings the pressure off in order to appease them. And there's a through line in there where a tremendous amount of people in and around this administration are making a ton of money off it. That's point number one. It's kind of cynical.

But point number two is, you know, you can point to that New York Times piece over the weekend, which illustrated a lot of the goings on inside the White House, which was backed up by Tim Walts on the ambassador Waltz over the weekend on Meet the Press, where we're running low on the munitions to prosecute this war. And that is something that has been kind of readily apparent to those of us in and around the military. People have been talking about this for months. and it's I think it's getting more and more difficult for them to have effects on target. And when you combine that with the broadening of the war, you had the Houthis enter this and shut down Babel Membeb over the, I guess it was the course of last week into the weekend. And it broadened the front. Like where do you, where do you focus your effort? And we just simply don't have the munitions or the military capacity to take all this on at the same time.

So I'm hoping that this really is, you know, the page turning that the message has been received, that there is no military solution for this conflict. But I'm not going to hold my breath either because we've seen this economic loop time and time and time again. Right, right. It's interesting what you say about the depletion of military supplies. The Secretary of Defense, who calls himself the Secretary of War, stated under oath before the Senate Finance Committee. in front of which he was requesting an additional $88 billion to prosecute this illegal, pointless war,

that we are not running low on supplies. But how can he get away with saying something like that? Slet a hand, very much sleet a hand, qualifying speech. So if you look at certain aspects of what we have, like we have a tremendous amount of, say, ammunition for infantrymen. So you could say, well, I thought that I was talking, you know, about direct fire munitions, or something like small diameter bombs that come in via, you know,

kits with laser guidance systems, or you can just drop them as dummies. We have plenty of those. We have those for years. So he could say that, well, I was thinking about those type of munitions. What we have been using, though, are standoff musicians, such as the jasm and the tomahawk, which we've been blowing through at the rate of, I mean, the thousands. And it takes a long time for the. supply lines on those to catch up.

And we're talking, we're talking years, 20, 30 at the earliest for Tomahawks. Jasm is probably about the same timeline. And the reason this is important is because our pilots have been using a tremendous amount of these due to the, what appears to be, and Al-Qawe's what appears to be the density of Iranian air defenses and the layering of them all the way back through their country. So we can't get too close. And you saw a number of aircraft hit in the first couple of months of this, war including an F-35. And they were hit by passive IR systems. I've talked to people inside the

military about that. What does that mean passive IR? So it's something that is not actively seeking, right? So if you have a radar lock on a target, then the pilot will get an indicator saying, hey, you have something that's tracking your radar system and a missile is right behind it. Passive IR is they're picking up heat signatures and there's somebody in the loop who kind of who kind of guides the system that last distance the infrared picks up and goes after to be the tailpipe. Let's get back to Hegseth. Yeah. Can someone credibly accuse him of lying or at least misleading? And by the way, misleading Congress is the same five-year penalty as lying to Congress. Yeah, I mean, you're the you're the judge, sir. And I would say dissembling is definitely a lie.

and he's definitely dissembling in order to further his own personal objectives or what he perceives is what we'll get him ahead. The second part of that question, though, is will Congress do anything about it? And this is quite possibly the most inept legislative body that we've had ever in the history of this country. If they won't step forward on something as cut and dry as war powers and their own constitutional authority to declare war being vested strictly in them, I don't think they're going to go after the Secretary of Defense for lying to them. What do the troops think of the Secretary of Defense when he sounds like a maniac? I don't appreciate it. You know, I hear from people who are still in and people who have just gotten out on a pretty regular basis.

And they can do without the bluster. You know, this is supposed to be the top position for DOD in this country. And it requires somebody who has a very tempered attitude who can make very, you know, well thought out decisions. They're not caught up by bluster. I mean, that kind of stuff, that doesn't even pick up your average Lance Corporal on the ground. You know, if you have a commanding officer who's in his 20s or 30s, he's out there thumping his chest like he's the toughest guy in the neighborhood. You don't want to follow him. I've been there.

And it's the same attitude here except probably worse, you know, that he's out there flexing his man card on a daily basis. And it is, you know, it's for the audience that's not the troops because it's not getting them. It's probably actually demoralizing them a bit. There are those who believe that Donald Trump shows Pete Hagseth because he looks like he just came from central casting. He looks the part. He doesn't look like Robert McNamara or Austin Lloyd. Okay. To Trump. Why do you think he threatens to slaughter the Iranian people as much as he threatens to crush the government? I think it's primarily judged for his domestic audience. He is looking for a way to energize his base, and he's running out of options.

So he goes to the most extreme for a domestic audience, and he doesn't have the wherewithal or the situational awareness to understand how this plays out overseas at all. I also think this probably goes back to his dealings when he was in real estate, where I guess the methodology is slap, slap kiss to summarize it, where you know, you verbally beat around the person you're negotiating with or you take some actions on the periphery, which pressure them. But at the end of the day, you make up and you cut a deal and your friends, you share champagne. But that is not foreign relations. And he feels somehow that applying this methodology to international relations or to the Iranians is going to intimidate

them. And it speaks to his ignorance about who these people are. The Iranians are an empire that have been around for thousands of years. I mean, they fought the Greeks. I mean, they go way, way back. And in order to intimidate somebody like that, you probably have to get in the ring with them and show them that you are more physically dominant rather than just speaking about it. And I say get in the ring from a rhetorical standpoint. Right, right, right. Well, you mentioned that domestic audience in one of our chatters reminds us that he has two domestic audiences, one in the United States and one in Tel Aviv. It's not inaccurate at all.

Correct. Correct. I talked to me about the Pentagon investigating itself. So when the Pentagon incinerated 167 schoolgirls around the second or third day of the war 2.0, so we're now down at the very end of February and the very beginning of March. We know they did so with more than one bomb, and we know that they targeted the school. Maybe they thought it was something else, but they targeted it. Then there was an investigation. Then nothing happened. Nobody took blame. Nobody took responsibility. Hegss says he can't talk about it because it's an ongoing investigation. Should the Pentagon be trusted to investigate itself? How does it do the investigations? And what happened here? So I'll start with what probably happened. This building was part of the Iranian military compound that was there in prior.

years. I know we've been using a lot of AI targeting and also outsourcing our targeting to countries like Israel. I think that this was probably a mistake inside the Pentagon. I would hope, I would truly hope it was not a deliberate strike because that would cross a threshold with U.S. military that I quite frankly, I don't even want to think about how purely evil that would be. What doesn't make it any better is the fact that we have taken zero accountability for it. It has all the signatures of a double-tap U.S. strike in order to take out as many personnel as possible. And unfortunately, it was highly effective in this regard. But the U.S. military has, for a very long time, apologized for these kinds of mistakes. And what he's doing at the very, very top,

shows a lack of integrity. I mean, just by saying, I can't comment on this because it's an ongoing investigation is the oldest throwaway line in the book. I mean, you can take a look at any police investigation that's used that. Nobody likes it. They should not be investigating themselves. What they really should just be doing is admitting that they did it because we did do it. And then apologizing for it, saying, hey, we did not mean to do this. We are sorry. The war is not against the Iranian people. Like we've done in every conflict, we did that on the ground when I was in Iraq. You so much just shot a goat on the other side. And you had to pay it out. And you apologize for that. Little school girls, exponentially different. And I saw some of the videos last

week of them burying those girls. And I couldn't help but think about my own daughters and how horrific this is. But this goes back to what we were talking about a second ago as well with the message he's sending down to the troops. And he is not sending a message of integrity, of accountability, of any of the leadership principles you instill into your people, because he is completely dodging the question and making up excuses as to why we are not, you know, even addressing this at all. They're pretending as if it didn't happen. And this is a bad thing that a leader, this is not even a bad thing. This is the wrong thing for a leader to do.

It's someone who is not a leader. Well, I mean, will any level of bombing break the resistance of the Iranian people? I think the answer to that is no. and I wish the White House understood that. No, you're completely correct, Judge. Bombing alone has never broken the will of a people at anywhere in any kind of war. You cannot win a war by air power, just straight up, period, end of discussion. You can affect the industries.

If you go to a total war model, like we did in World War II, and you eliminate the capacity for a country to wage war, you can degrade that capacity over years. But that's not going to prevent people from fighting. You know, if you take a look at how Japanese resistance shaped during World War II, the closer we got to mainland Japan, the more of an imperative that the individual Japanese soldier had to fight. And the battles got bloodier and bloodier and bloodier. And you can look at places like Okinawa, Palauulu, and Iwojima for examples of that. It was no different on the eastern front of World War II. The closer the Soviets got to Berlin, the stiffer the resistance became.

and it had nothing to do with the fact, it was actually the exact opposite of the effect of the bombing on Germany at the time. Here, we don't have the really the ability or the proven ability to reduce anything that is keeping the Iranians as an effective fighting force. We're not destroying their stockpiles. It doesn't appear that we are even interrupting their ability to reconstitute themselves. It hasn't changed the regime. And if you take a look at the number of Iranians who have been demonstrating in the street, on behalf of the regime, it's quite frankly emboldened and solidified the people who are in power right now and is backfired. Our friend and colleague Alster Kruk told me this morning that the government is actually more moderate than the people are, that the people by and large in Iran are ferocious for revenge.

Revenge against Trump, revenge against Netanyahu, revenge against the United States, revenge against Israel. Let's go back to the bombing of the school and address that from the title of this segment. Can troops disobey illegal orders? Suppose they knew it was a school. And Hegseth said, bomb it anyway. We want to demoralize the community. What are the troops guys like you supposed to do? Guys like you were when you were active duty?

You say no. You say straight up, no. It is, you are taught that at the earliest days of boot camp that you are, you're not only not supposed to carry out an illegal order and striking a civilian target like that would be a very cut and dry example. You have the moral duty to do so. And the way you would do that is you would refuse. What you would really need as an officer to resign in place and say, we're just not going to do. do this. And then from there, inside the system, unfortunately, it probably gets a little dicey because you will have layers and layers and layers of people looking to cover their own ass all the way up. But we live in a day right now or a time where there is independent media like this show, any number of outlets. So I would suggest that anybody who would be involved in anything like that resign their position, quit immediately, and go directly to the media and shed some light on this because, I mean, one thing that really concerns me is when you have, you know,

and you have multiple investigations in DOD. One, I'll start with the audit. DoD continuously fails to complete its own audit and find out even where its money goes. Then you have the example of Heggseth basically babysitting his own investigation. So that would make me worry about individuals, individuals on the inside who want to do the right thing. So going internal may cause you more problems. Now, this gets into a third piece. It's like, would an officer do this?

There's a long track record coming out of a global war on terrorism of officers who, you know, they want to get promoted and then they want to graduate out into that great defense contractor network and, you know, make some real cheddar. So they keep their mouth shut about a lot of stuff. Would they keep their mouth shut about this? Possibly. But I know that there are a tremendous amount of people with integrity inside the military who are there for the right reasons who would possibly or, you know, almost definitely, do. the right thing in that kind of scenario. But I would say the appropriate vehicle is to go external to the media these days. All right.

Everybody in the military is there as a volunteer. We don't have the draft anymore. Can you just leave? Can you just quit? Not really. I mean, but the thing is, is this would be a very unique set of circumstances where you are compelled under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, you know, to effectively blow the whistle by refusing an illegal order.

I would imagine that if you said you were going to do that, you'd basically be canned from your post anyways. So you're in a position where you just kind of naturally would have quit. And then you just kind of continue that arc until you make it difficult for them to do something with you. Wow. Let's take the murders of the fishermen and the speedboats on the high seas. This morning, the tally was 67 attacks and 200. 121 killed. Wow. I'm writing this week that the Attorney General, well, the acting Attorney General, who's nominated the Attorney General, bears some responsibility for this because he signed off on it

as a legitimate law enforcement technique, knowing that we don't do this, knowing that everybody, no matter what they're accused of doing, whether you're Richard Speck, slaughtering nurses in their sleep in a dormitory in Chicago or a Jaywalker. are entitled to due process a fair trial before a neutral jury. Trump has decided these people are so bad, the evidence against them, none of which has been revealed, is so overwhelming that they can just summarily be killed. Can the operators of the, I don't know if it's a drone or what they use to kill them, but the operators are in Florida, these murders take place in the Caribbean and the Pacific.

So can whoever's about to press that button say, I'm not doing it? you could um but you better have a job at the end like you know on the way out that's uh i think that's where they get these guys most of the time it's that there's your the information that's pushed down consistently validates the approach um and then if you're truly going to buck the system what do you do next what do you do with your family um and i empathize with that but doesn't make it right um the the true issue with this is exactly what you're talking about where this is a law enforcement action that is being solved by military force and it's completely unprecedented. And, you know, I take a look at these boats and in how they're hit and where

they're hit. And quite frankly, like, if you have the ability to get eyes on them, then you have the ability to say, put a helicopter up there and arrest them. If there's evidence, arrest them. Absolutely, without question. In one case, there were two survivors and the Navy picked them up. And they called lawyers from the DOJ and said, what should we do with them? We think. We think they're drug traffickers. And the lawyers from the DOJ said, well, what evidence do you have? And the Navy lawyers said, none. We just got two guys that survived.

Better return them home. We're not going to prosecute them if there is no evidence, and you can't kill them. You better bring them home. They did. And those two guys are suing the federal government for attempted murder. And rightly so. Right. Wow.

Yeah, it's, I mean, it's kind of a little bit of irony there when you hit the boat with a drone and the guys survived or evidence if you had any sinks to the bottom of the ocean. But on the front end, this is this is really what really one of the things that stuck with me about all of this is I think back to my time in the military. And if me or anybody around me was going to pull the trigger, then you needed to have what we call it positive ID. you needed to see something that represented a hostile threat or a hostile intent before you engaged. And we even had to walk up through different weapons systems where you couldn't just engage with, say, a 50 caliber machine gun. It had to be proportional not only to the threat, but you had to have considerations for potential civilians in the background. And when you're taking a look at a speedboat moving 70 miles an hour and I've taken a look at these videos, I'm not an imagery expert by any stretch. But I can't see one rifle.

And for somebody to make the legal argument that the possibility that they are potentially running something like cocaine or fentanyl. And I know Senator Ram Paul has been out there a number of times saying that these boats were stopping off at different points before they even reached the United States. But to say that those substances represented some sort of hostile threat to the national security of the United States is well beyond any kind of. of legal stretch i have ever seen i don't even know i don't know if you could sort something like that out but i'm not a lawyer and i don't know any lawyers you could make that stretch by frankly no you're

you're right on the mark do marines sign up to kill you become a marine in order to kill people no no not at all no i joined the marine corps because my dad was a marine uh because my grandfather was a marine because i wanted to prove my medal that i was tough enough to do it um and also you know as a as a mentality thing, I grew up playing every single sport that I could possibly enroll in. And it was just the infantry was the ultimate team sport. You know, it's you, you get paid to work out, you get to shoot guns, you get to camp. And I'm saying this like all somewhat in jest. But really, I mean, that's what you do.

And a byproduct of that when you join during war is you have to go fight for your country. Now, nobody signs the dotted line, I believe, being like sweet. You know, once I ink this paper, like, I get to go shoot somebody. That would be pretty psychotic. But what you do say is, hey, like, I'm going to go prove myself as a man, as the next one in my lineage, to go do this and to serve my country. And, you know, basically it's to earn my stripes. And in my case, quite literally, but it had nothing to do with actually killing people now. So, Sid Rosenberg is a longtime friend of mine, even though he can be a lunatic.

Yeah. He's right across the street from me now. I'm going to have to go over there and have some words for them, but I'll put my money on you any day. I appreciate that. If people want to know what I'm talking about, they can go to your website and watch the rant that you gave and which you devoured him.

How would they find it? It's go to the, it's the Jim Webb podcast over on YouTube. It's at Jim Webb podcast. It's also at Jim Webb Podcast on X. Or if you're so inclined, you can follow me directly. it's at James Webb underscore 16 on X. But yeah, when after him a little bit this morning,

I could not believe. And none of those people, they're all my friends and former colleagues hosting Fox and Friends. None of them challenged them. No. Wow. Oh, well. Jim Webb,

always a pleasure from the great Webb family of Marines. And you have a great podcast and you're a friend of the show. And I truly appreciate you being on twice and in four days. Thank you, my dear friend. Judge, pleasure's mine. Thank you. Thank you. Okay.

Coming up at 3 o'clock today, Robert Barnes, who has the inside scoop on what happens in the White House. What are Trump's inner circle members telling him? Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.