Read: War-crime pardons dishonor fallen heroes

Hegseth is right that lawyers hover in the background of many combat decisions. Before bombs are dropped, lawyers confirm that the target is legal. But these crimes do not involve close calls, legally. The decision to blow a hole the size of an apple into the torso of an unarmed teenage girl does not require legal evaluation so much as psychiatric evaluation. Mathew L. Golsteyn, the Army major who admitted to ambushing and shooting an Afghan, claimed the man was a Taliban bomb-maker. Golsteyn need not have worried about legalistic Monday-morning quarterbacking; during his concealment, he could have texted a lawyer about the situation, and quickly received the advice that he was midway through an act known as premeditated murder.

Trump’s military doctrine has been difficult to discern, but it is sharpening into focus. Strategically, he favors isolationism in the mode of Republican Senator Rand Paul and Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard. When forced to deploy, he prefers weak enemies like the Islamic State, and for long-term deployments, he prefers to commit to worthless, uncontested objectives, like the meager and wrecked oil fields of Syria. He favors extremely lax rules of engagement. Even repeated, planned acts contrary to the letter and spirit of military law and ethical codes are forgiven, and his warfighters are unconstrained by modern laws of armed conflict.

You might call this program a form of deregulation, parallel to the deregulation he has pushed in other sectors, including environmental protection and finance. Deregulation is much stupider in war than it is in those other fields. If you deregulate polluters, you may end up poisoning the environment—but at least the environment is inanimate, and does not arm itself reciprocally, to match the violence you freed yourself to commit against it. Battlefield enemies are different. ISIS is already willing to commit atrocities against Americans, but now more scrupulous rivals of the United States can reasonably infer that if they fight us according to the laws of armed conflict, they are suckers. One reason more than 80 countries allied to fight ISIS is that they flagrantly ignored these laws. Now we do too.

And for what? ISIS and the Taliban have killed Americans. But militarily, these groups are nuisance insects, and the SEALs and Green Berets make very effective flyswatters with their ethical standards in place. Those standards are, additionally, a source of dignity, which separate them from barbarians. The development of those codes has paralleled the decline of armed conflict as a political instrument. Pardons for those who ignored those codes do not just tell our enemies that they would be suckers to follow them; they tell the 99 percent of American soldiers and sailors who respected them that they were suckers, too. “You have to play the game the way [ISIS is] playing the game,” Trump told John Dickerson in 2016, while still a candidate. Now, as president, he is implementing that policy, and telling members of a once-proud fighting force that they should be savages and sneaks.