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Orders: Non-commissioned Officer and Order Essay

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“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.” Whether you’re black or white, woman or man, your first language learned was Spanish or English, if you enlist in the United States Military you swear this oath. National Guard enlistees swear a similar oath but with an addition that they “swear to obey the orders of the Governor of their state.” Officers have a different oath that they must swear when …show more content…

If the order isn’t lawful or is illegal you have the right to disobey the order, without fear of punishment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). If you happened to follow the illegal order given to you by a superior and you were caught, the excuse “I was only following orders”, as you will find is a very doomed position to have in our courts. In the Nuremberg trials, Nazi leaders attempted to implicate this excuse as an appropriate defense for what they did in the many concentration camps spread all over Germany. In 1961, Yale University psychologist Stanly Milgram conducted a series of experiments to attempt to explain if the Nazi’s who took the orders shared the belief of anti-Semitism with their superior officers or were they truly just “following orders.” Three individuals were involved in his experiment: The subject of the experiment (volunteer), a confederate pretending to be a volunteer, and

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