Former U.S. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has urged senior Pentagon leaders to challenge what he describes as unlawful military actions and to reject an overly narrow interpretation of their responsibilities under President Donald Trump. Kendall served as Air Force secretary during former President Joe Biden’s administration.

The New York Times published an op-ed by Kendall on September 1. He expanded on his concerns during an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, explaining why he had written publicly “against what’s happening in the Pentagon.”

Asked what concerned him most, Kendall said, “I’m very concerned about how our military is going to be used. It’s already been used in some ways which almost all legal authorities believe is unlawful. The most egregious version of that is the extrajudicial killings of alleged drug dealers in the Pacific and the Caribbean. The campaign has been going on for about a year now.”

Kendall also sharply criticized Trump’s handling of the war with Iran. He said Trump “initiated” a “war with Iran” that “was never authorized by Congress.”

“And so, none of our military leaders that I’m aware of have stood up and said no, this is unacceptable,” Kendall told Amanpour. “But the election’s coming up. I’m very concerned about how our military might be used in the context of the elections, either leading up the elections, during them or following them if there’s unrest.”

Kendall said his recent writing was intended to remind senior military leaders that their responsibilities extend beyond presenting the administration’s actions as normal or narrowly defining their role as advising and supporting the president.

“Part of the piece I wrote recently was to let our senior military leaders know that the things they seem to be doing as defense mechanisms, pretending everything is going well — and then kind of portioning off their role in terms of advising and supporting the president to be very narrowly defined of purely defined — is really not appropriate. It’s a copout. They have broader responsibilities,” he said.

In his September 1 New York Times op-ed, Kendall wrote: “Denial is one of the two approaches the nation’s senior military leaders seem to have taken to cope with Donald Trump’s presidency. When they aren’t ignoring how abnormal things have become, they turn to the other approach, claiming that they have no responsibility for the actions the armed forces have been ordered to take because those orders were ‘policy’ choices outside the scope of their duties. This is a copout, and it is putting our democracy at risk.”

Primary sources: New York Times op-ed, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on X, and the same post on Twitter.