Trump has taken the opposite stance. In a tweet on Oct. 12, the president declared: “We train our boys to be killing machines, and then prosecute them when they kill!”

Pete Hegseth — a former captain in the Army National Guard who served in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay and received two Bronze Stars and a Combat Infantryman Badge — is a co-host on “Fox and Friends.” He is (and has long been) a leading proponent of the pardons. After the president announced his decision, Hegseth told Fox viewers:

President Trump has emboldened the people out there making the impossible calls at impossible moments. If you look at each of these cases, there’s plenty of reasons to question the veracity of these prosecutors. These are not cases where people went into villages with the intention of killing innocent people. These are split-second decisions.

General Martin Dempsey, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, disagreed, posting this on Twitter:

Absent evidence of innocence or injustice the wholesale pardon of US service members accused of war crimes signals our troops and allies that we don’t take the Law of Armed Conflict seriously. Bad message. Bad precedent. Abdication of moral responsibility.

General Charles C. Krulak, former commandant of the United States Marine Corps and a former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also disagreed. He told The Wall Street Journal that Trump’s intervention “betrays these ideals and undermines decades of precedent in American military justice that has contributed to making our country’s fighting forces the envy of the world.”

Scholars of the military generally took the side of Dempsey and Krulak in opposition to the pardons.

Mara Karlin, the director of the strategic studies program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development during the Obama administration, was incisive in her critique of the war crimes pardons. In an email, Karlin wrote:

While some in the military are surely enthusiastic that Trump did so because they support him or Gallagher, they may be underestimating the precedent now set. Of all the contemporary norms that Trump has violated vis-à-vis the military, this is among the most catastrophic because at the end of the day, a transparent, trustworthy, and effective military justice system is the sine qua non of a transparent, trustworthy, and effective military.

There are a wide range of variations on this basic critique.

Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict and Governance program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argued in an email that the pardons are just one aspect of Trump’s misuse and misunderstanding of the military:

President Trump has failed to understand the delicate and unique role of a military in a democracy from the beginning. From his declarations about ‘my’ generals early on, to his decision to appoint military members to civilian roles within the military, he showed a failure to appreciate the idea of civilian control of a nonetheless professional service.

Trump’s attempts, Kleinfeld wrote,