The Uniform Doesn't Come With a First Amendment Waiver

Picture the scene. A U.S. Air Force major stands on the Capitol steps in his service uniform, ribbons and all, calling for the president and vice president to be impeached and removed from office. The cameras love it. His attorney calls him a man of conscience. I call him a 17-year officer who knew the rulebook better than anyone defending him now wants to admit, and who decided the cameras were worth breaking his oath anyway.

This is not a free-speech case. It is a contract case. Watson signed up for a legal system civilians do not live under, one that trades away certain freedoms for the authority to wear the uniform and carry a weapon on behalf of the republic. He broke that contract in the most public way he could find, and now he wants the country to treat the resulting charges as persecution rather than the predictable consequence of his own choices.

Article 88 has been on the books since the earliest days of the UCMJ, and prosecutors have used it so rarely that legal commentators keep reaching back to the 1965 court-martial of Lt. Henry Howe, who carried a sign criticizing the president at an off-post peace rally, as the only real precedent. Watson is now the modern test case, and the Air Force will have to prove his words were contemptuous in the legal sense, not merely blunt or political.

My family has worn this uniform from more than one angle. I went through Marine Corps Officer Candidate School back in 1988. My youngest brother built his career as a Green Beret Weapons Sergeant in Army Special Forces. My oldest son graduated from West Point and now serves as a commissioned officer. None of us ever mistook the uniform for a personal microphone, because political neutrality gets drilled into you before you learn almost anything else. Not because the military distrusts your opinions, but because the country needs one institution that answers to whoever the voters put in the Oval Office, not to whichever officer feels strongest about the news that week.

Article 88 does not ban criticism of the president. It bans “contemptuous words,” a standard requiring proof of language that is insulting, disdainful, or otherwise disrespectful toward the office, not simply forceful disagreement with policy. A lieutenant grumbling in the officers' club is a world away from a major standing on the Capitol steps in uniform demanding impeachment on national television. Watson's lawyers will call his comments fair criticism. The Air Force call it contempt. That fight belongs in a courtroom, and an Article 32 hearing is the proper venue to sort it out, not a cable news green room.

Every officer in the military has watched “A Few Good Men” and quietly wondered which side of that courtroom they would end up on. Watson apparently decided the answer was neither witness stand nor defendant's chair, but the evening news. Bruce Willis's line from “The Siege” comes closer to the point than Watson's lawyers would like: the military is a broadsword, not a scalpel. You do not hand a broadsword to every officer who feels a strong personal conviction about foreign policy and let him swing it at whatever target looks good on camera. You keep the broadsword sheathed until the civilians who actually run the country decide where to point it.

General Colin Powell put it better than I can: soldiers watch what their leaders do, not what they are told in a lecture hall. That principle cuts directly against Watson. An officer corps that treats public political theater as an acceptable career move teaches every captain and lieutenant underneath it that the chain of command is optional whenever conscience says otherwise. That is precisely the habit a republic cannot afford in the people it arms and trains to follow orders.

Run the thought experiment the other direction. Imagine a two-star general in dress blues at a political rally demanding a Democratic president's impeachment over immigration policy or COVID mandates. Most of the commentators cheering Watson today would suddenly rediscover their appreciation for an apolitical military. The rule has to apply regardless of who sits in the Oval Office, or it is not a rule. It is tribalism wearing a uniform.

Watson had real options if his objections to the administration's Iran policy were genuine and urgent. The Department of Defense Inspector General exists for exactly this purpose. Members of Congress take calls from constituents in uniform every day. He could have resigned his commission, a right every officer holds, and then said whatever he wanted as a private citizen under the full protection of the First Amendment. He was reportedly about three years from retirement. None of those paths generate a CNN interview or a Substack appearance, which may be the point.

The Article 92 charge for refusing to put his uniform back on the morning after his television appearance tells you the most. That is not a man quietly following his conscience while accepting the consequences. That is a man escalating a confrontation he had already chosen to start, twice arrested, now held in pretrial confinement pending review under Rule for Courts-Martial 305.

Some will argue this prosecution chills legitimate internal dissent about a war whose constitutional basis deserves genuine debate, and there is something to that concern on the merits. Congress has largely abdicated its Article I war powers for decades, under presidents of both parties, and that is worth arguing about in the op-ed pages, in Congress, and in the courts. But the venue matters as much as the message. A serving officer does not get to substitute his own judgment for the constitutional process by holding a press conference in uniform. If every officer who disagreed with a deployment decision felt entitled to a Capitol Hill microphone instead of the chain of command, we would not have an armed force. We would have five hundred thousand separate foreign policies.

The case now moves toward a possible Article 32 hearing, and the Air Force District of Washington will eventually decide whether it proceeds to a special or general court-martial. Watson remains presumed innocent, and the maximum punishments under Article 88 alone, dismissal, forfeiture of pay, and up to a year of confinement, are exactly that: a maximum, not a guarantee. The government still has to prove every element, including that his words crossed the legal line into contempt rather than criticism.

But whatever a court-martial panel decides about the specifics, the larger lesson does not depend on the verdict. Put on the uniform, and you speak for the country, not against whoever happens to be commanding it. Cable news attention fades fast. A UCMJ conviction, and the loss of a pension three years from vesting, does not. Watson wanted to be a hero of the resistance. He may instead become the cautionary tale every judge advocate uses to explain Article 88 to the next officer who thinks the cameras are worth the risk.

Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.