American service members are asking to be let out of the military because they believe they are being ordered to break the law.

Not a handful of them. MS NOW reported on August 26 that the number of service members applying to leave the armed forces as conscientious objectors has spiked since the war with Iran started in late February, according to the two organizations that help them file. One of those groups says its applications are running at six times their normal rate — higher, it says, than at any point in the past 25 years.

That is the group we send to do the fighting telling us, in the one formal way the military allows, that something has gone badly wrong.

And in nearly six months of this war, Congress has never held a vote to authorize it.

What the troops say they were ordered to do

A conscientious objector application is not a resignation letter. To get out this way, the Pentagon requires a service member to prove a "firm, fixed, sincere and deeply held" moral or religious objection to war. You fill out a written form, you can add supporting letters, and then you sit for round after round of interviews — your chain of command, a chaplain, a mental health evaluator — before the secretary of your service branch signs off. It can take a year.

People do not go through that for fun. Five of them told MS NOW why they started.

One was assigned to support the air campaign against Iran and came to believe the United States was bombing civilian infrastructure, which the Geneva Conventions forbid:

"I realized there's no way that you could interpret the international laws as saying that you're allowed to strike civilian bridges, but in reality, if the president wants to blow up bridges, the lawyers will find a way to say that it is OK to do it, and nobody anywhere up or down the chain of command ever stops and says no."

They raised it with their superiors. They were told most of the targets were "dual-use" — military and civilian at the same time — which, if true, can make a strike legal. It did not settle the question for them.

Another loaded weapons onto planes flying off an aircraft carrier in the Caribbean and watched the planes come back empty, never learning who had been hit.

"You can tell yourself what you want at night and say they were all precision strikes and they were all planned, but there's at least one innocent person that I feel like I indirectly hurt."

These are not protesters. These are the people doing the work.

The boats

The Caribbean flights are part of Operation Southern Spear, the campaign President Trump launched in September 2025 against boats the administration says are carrying drugs. The military has struck at least 60 of them and killed more than 210 people.

One service member told MS NOW they raised concerns about it with their peers but not with their superiors, because they were afraid of retaliation.

Congress had one real chance to look at how those strikes are run, and it dropped it. After the Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had verbally ordered a crew to "kill everybody" — including two men found clinging to the wreckage of a boat the U.S. had already blown up — the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee promised a "full accounting." Eleven days later he watched a classified video and declared the case closed. The public has still never seen that video.

The school in Minab

The single event that comes up most often on these calls is a school.

On the first day of the war, a girls' school in Minab, Iran was bombed. NPR reported that at least 165 civilians were killed, many of them children, and that a preliminary assessment found the United States was at fault. The building may have appeared on an outdated American target list as a military site, left over from when the grounds were part of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval base.

Bill Galvin, who counsels service members at the Center on Conscience and War, told NPR the strike comes up on nearly every call:

"It comes up almost always. It's like, 'I can't be a part of something that's doing that.'"

Mike Prysner, who runs the same organization's hotline, told MS NOW that his group normally works with about 50 conscientious objectors in a year. Since the war started, it has taken on roughly 140. A second organization, the GI Rights Hotline at Quaker House, is now walking about 30 people through the application process at once, compared with five to 10 before the war.

Prysner's clients are not who you would expect, either. He said many have served more than a decade, span every rank up to major, and some went to service academies.

"The Iran War was really the breaking point for them when they realized that they had to take action to make sure that they did not participate in something that they were going to regret for the rest of their lives."

Nobody in Congress ever voted for this

Here is the part that belongs to the people we elect.

The war started in late February 2026. Congress has never voted to authorize it. The Constitution gives that power to Congress and to nobody else, and the men and women now filing paperwork to get out are fighting a war their own representatives never approved.

It is not that the question never came up. It came up constantly, and Republicans voted it down.

On July 23, the House voted 214 to 208 to order U.S. forces out of the fighting. It passed anyway — but 182 Republicans we track voted no, and only four Republicans in the entire House voted yes.

One week later the Senate would not even agree to debate it. A motion to pull a war powers resolution out of committee failed 49 to 50. According to Roll Call, that was the 13th time the Senate had voted on ending this war. Thirteen senators we track voted no — and the margin was a single vote.

The committee that exists to ask a president why we are at war has not held a single public oversight hearing on it. Its chairman decided the public didn't need to hear the answers.

Meanwhile 624 American service members have been wounded in this war, according to the Pentagon's own count — a number that appeared in a database with no announcement. The same casualty page quietly dropped four dead soldiers from its total overnight in July.

"Zero retention concerns"

While all of this was happening, Hegseth has been boasting that the military is hitting recruiting highs.

Asked about retention, Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson told NPR flatly: "There are zero retention concerns for Fiscal Year 2026. Every service is meeting its targets, and any suggestion otherwise is completely false."

That answer is built to be technically survivable. Experts told NPR that service members trying to leave right now wouldn't show up in any hard data for months or even years. Someone who files an application and waits a year for a decision is not missing from anybody's recruiting target yet.

The Defense Department did not respond to MS NOW's requests for comment before its story published.

What the record shows

Two organizations that help service members leave the military say conscientious objector applications have spiked since the Iran war began — one is running at six times its normal rate, the highest in 25 years, and has taken about 140 cases since February against roughly 50 in a typical year. The troops filing them point to an air campaign that killed at least 165 civilians at a girls' school, and to boat strikes that have killed more than 210 people. Congress has never voted to authorize any of it. When the House voted in July to order U.S. forces out, 207 Republicans voted to keep the war going; a week later the Senate refused, by one vote, even to debate the question.

Source

"Troops fighting against Iran and alleged drug smugglers say they are being asked to violate international law," by Priya Sridhar and Peggy Helman, MS NOW, August 26, 2026. Photo via MS NOW: U.S. sea drones strike a submarine and a ship maintenance facility on July 13, 2026, in an undisclosed area of Iran.