On Saturday, two Apache helicopters from the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, based in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, buzzed musician Kid Rock’s mansion while on a training mission in Tennessee. That training mission, in case it needs to be stated, did not include those helicopters hovering near the well-known MAGA acolyte’s pool.
It would have constituted dereliction of duty for Army leaders at Fort Campbell not to have ordered an investigation.
Kid Rock took advantage of the moment, gleefully posting videos on social media while thanking those who serve. Reportedly, those same two helicopters flew low over a staging area for a No Kings rally in Nashville. That maneuver was reminiscent of the Army helicopters intimidating Americans protesting George Floyd’s murder in the nation’s capital in 2020.
It would have constituted dereliction of duty for Army leaders at Fort Campbell not to have ordered an investigation, given credible evidence of potential malfeasance. Indeed, the Army immediately did the right thing, and the fully expected thing, in response to its service members getting caught red-handed goofing off in their multimillion-dollar pieces of military hardware and likely violating military orders governing the parameters of that training mission. That is, two helicopter crews were immediately suspended from flying duties and an investigation was ordered.
But then Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the Army to immediately cease its investigation, posting on social media: “No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, patriots.”
Hegseth’s response was simultaneously extraordinary and unsurprising. It’s extraordinary because it overruled a by-the-script response by the helicopter crews’ superiors. It’s unsurprising because he’s already demonstrated his disdain for rules and the law — indeed, his contempt for anything that constrains what he and President Donald Trump want to do. That disdain is coupled with his overt efforts to politicize the U.S. military to align it with the MAGA movement.
The U.S. military institutionally functions as an apolitical entity, loyal to the Constitution, but there’s no denying the political tinge of these two incidents. Kid Rock is affiliated with MAGA, and the administration obviously dislikes Americans who protest in No Kings events. Hegseth must have loved that some rogue Army pilots appear to have made their own rules and optically expressed alignment with MAGA in the process. By terminating the investigation, Hegseth is signaling that rule-breaking in favor of MAGA is OK, and that it can be conducted with impunity. We can trust that the reverse is not true: If the choppers had dropped leaflets in support of No Kings protesters, for example, we have every reason to believe Hegseth would be ordering a court-martial.
Given the costly Iran war and U.S. service members’ ongoing sacrifices in support of it — more than 300 injured and 13 killed in combat to date — two helicopter crews flying in unpermitted areas in Tennessee may seem trivial. However, military rules regarding where and when to fly are deadly serious. Just ask the Marine pilots who flew too low over the Italian Alps in 1998 and cut a gondola wire, causing 20 skiers to plunge to their deaths. Or ask the Air Force about the pilot who disregarded numerous safety rules when training for an air show in 1994 in his B-52 and killed himself and three other crew members in the ensuing crash.
Military flight regulations aren’t rules for rules’ sake. They matter because they support certain ends, including keeping our troops and innocent people safe during military operations, and even more mundane but still important goals like preserving expensive fuel.
But Hegseth did not let Army commanders do their job. He did not let them investigate their soldiers for potential safety and training mission violations. He did not let them take appropriate corrective action if they determined there was misconduct. He did not let commanders send the message to their troops that obedience matters and that unprofessionalism will not be tolerated. He didn’t even give the military chain of command the opportunity to determine that no rules were broken.
Military flight regulations aren’t rules for rules’ sake.
Nope, the secretary of defense utterly failed to do what is needed to ensure military members follow lawful orders. And in that, he failed to maintain the most disciplined and professional — dare I say “lethal” — military there is. Our military is effective in large part because of good order and discipline. The application of lethal violence is accomplished in discrete, precise and thoughtful ways that comport with the law of war.
Such inappropriate obstruction of an Army investigation is also unsurprising given that as a Fox News host the Army veteran Hegseth whined incessantly about what he called the needlessly restrictive rules of engagement, that he has described lawyers like me as bad guys who tie the war-fighters’ hands, and that he has adopted the mantra of “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” During the first Trump term, he lobbied loudly to excuse service members convicted or credibly accused of serious war crimes and expressed contempt for the law of war. Upon taking office, he fired the services’ top military lawyers, claiming he needed to eliminate roadblocks. He certainly doesn’t like rules, and that’s what the law is chock-full of.
Two of my tours during my active-duty military career involved serving as defense counsel for military members, and in this case I don’t want Saturday’s helicopter crews to get into serious trouble. What I want are professional soldiers who don’t act like 16-year-olds while flying multimillion-dollar military choppers and don’t use their helicopter training missions as a flying social media post to express how MAGA they are. And I want a competent defense secretary who lets the professional military do its job, including ensuring good order and discipline.
Rachel E. VanLandingham retired as a lieutenant colonel from the U.S. Air Force. She is the Irwin R. Buchalter professor of law at Southwestern Law School, Los Angeles, and president emerita of the National Institute of Military Justice.