For anyone who disobeys the order, it's the end of their career; and every person with a conscience who leaves now will be replaced by someone who will gleefully follow much worse orders in due time. Everyone at the top levels whose job is to actually take a stand against these acts, to serve as a rallying point for others to know when the time to resist has come, have abdicated their duty. If the authoritarians are smart, they will never create a situation where we are backed into a corner, where the time to fight is obvious; we will be convinced that our best course of action is to continue in lockstep with the system in the hopes of fixing it, right up until the slaughter.

> every person with a conscience who leaves now will be replaced by someone who will gleefully follow much worse orders in due time.

Is that any better than people with a conscience staying and reluctantly following much worse orders in due time? At least when they leave, they send a message of resistance instead of silently capitulating.

Internal sabotage and/or physical resistance to the execution of unlawful orders (think My Lai type event) might be the more meaningful action for the ethically conflicted service member. I think things would be a lot worse if everyone sympathetic to the people resigned and left only regime loyalists in the ranks.

The question wasn't what should they do, it's why are they doing what they are currently doing?

That said, obviously the point of remaining is so that they can refuse those worse orders when they come, so that they can convince their peers to do the same or temper their actions, so that the administration needs to worry about pushing too far lest that wave of resignations comes at a critical moment. Alarming though the pattern may be, this is neither a clear cut violation of the constitution nor likely to be a major turning point in the administration's public support. Leaving now would be ineffectual - there is no plan in place to take advantage of a few resignations to put a serious damper on the current plans, nor will it stop what's to come. The people who resign now may feel good about themselves, maybe enough to justify the potential hardship they and their loved ones will suffer as a consequence, but they deny the rest of us a key resource. Resigning is a weapon that can only be fired once; it would be selfish and stupid to waste the shot.