General officers have offered a number of rationalizations for lack of moral courage over the years. The most often heard is that they feel they feel compelled to stay on because only they can do the job and mitigate the worst of the senior leader’s decision. This is tripe; no one is irreplaceable. I would bet that 80 percent of the serving military cannot remember who the last JCS chairman was.

The reality is that the very private threat of a resignation might well change a bad policy. No president in his right mind wants to see the very public resignation of a top general on principle. If his policy fails, and the Islamic State strategy surely will, President Obama would alone shoulder the blame for the debacle. The threat of a resignation itself might cause the president to reconsider his ill-advised action in taking American troops in a ground role off the table. Rather than be remembered as the failed implementer of a strategy that he knew to be fatally flawed, Dempsey would be an example to generations of future West Point cadets as a soldier who put honor and professionalism above career concerns.

In my own small way, I found that the threat of resignation can be a powerful tool over a decade ago. As a colonel commanding a camp on Okinawa in Japan in 1998, I became upset with a policy banning Okinawans from using the only recreational beach in the town neighboring the camp when we were not using it militarily; the policy was venal, and it came at a time when then Marine Corps was trying to improve relations with the Okinawans in the wake of a rape the year before I became commander. I asked for a private meeting with the base commanding general and handed him a draft e-mail requesting my relief and resignation explaining the reason; the commandant of the Marine Corps was an information addressee. I had been recently designated to be the chief of Staff of Marine Corps experimentation at the commandant’s direction, and the general and I both realized that my quitting over a seemingly trivial matter would reflect badly on the general himself. He tore up the e-mail and told me that the Okinawans could use the “damned beach” if it meant so much to me. I realized that the incident was not a career enhancer, but I slept well that night.