I think you’re right…
I think you’re right on about most of the points you touch on here. (Utah Phillips has a good monologue about just this topic, The Violence Within.) But here’s something that, given the rest of what you say, I find baffling.
Among many other people I count soldiers in this group, not least because of the oath they take to defend our best institutional hope against tyranny: the Constitution.
I certainly hope that the Constitution is not “our best institutional hope against tyranny.” If it is, we are all seriously in trouble.
But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.
— Lysander Spooner, No Treason No. 6: The Constitution of No Authority.
Anyway, practical questions aside, the right and the duty of soldiers to refuse tyrannical orders is a duty of conscience, which is higher than any government law or mortal oath. I can’t see what in the world the Constitution has to do with it.
Anticopyright.