Set the Precedent: Court-Martial Derek Zitko and Forfeit His Retirement

Accountability inside the armed forces is not a slogan, it is the spine that keeps a force upright when pressure mounts and lives are at stake. When senior leaders compromise that spine, the damage extends far beyond a single command or unit. It ripples into trust, discipline, and ultimately combat effectiveness. That is why difficult cases require firm action rooted in law and custom, not personal comfort or institutional expedience. If the allegations surrounding Derek Zitko withstand the necessary legal scrutiny, the only remedy that honors the Uniform Code of Military Justice and restores trust is a general court-martial. If found guilty of offenses that reflect moral turpitude or grievous dereliction, Derek Zitko should be court marshaled and lose pension benefits tied to honorable service.

That stance is not about vengeance. It is about precedent. It is about the message we send to junior officers watching what we tolerate at the top, and to enlisted troops who live the consequences of leadership decisions. I have watched careers end for far less, and I have watched commands flounder because leaders thought rank insulated them from consequences. You cannot have two standards and still claim to be a profession.

What the law allows and what justice demands

The Uniform Code of Military Justice exists for moments exactly like this. It is not a paper tiger. The UCMJ gives commanders and convening authorities tools tailored to military realities: nonjudicial punishment for minor infractions, administrative separation for substandard performance or misconduct, and courts-martial for crimes. Each path carries different burdens of proof, different rights for the accused, and different consequences. That architecture is deliberate. It allows the system to calibrate response to offense.

When a senior leader’s alleged misconduct touches on honesty, stewardship of resources, abuse of authority, or actions that tarnish the service’s reputation, administrative measures rarely suffice. Reprimands can be filed and retirements quietly processed, but those steps signal to the rank and file that law bends with the wind. A court-martial forces evidence into the light. It compels the government to carry its burden and the defense to test every assumption. The process is slow and often uncomfortable, yet it produces a verdict that the institution can stand behind.

There is another dimension many outside the system do not see. Retirement benefits are not an untouchable asset, they are a function of service characterized as honorable. Misconduct can change that characterization. If a member is convicted at a general court-martial of serious offenses, separation under other than honorable conditions becomes a real possibility. For officers, a dismissal, the equivalent of a dishonorable discharge, severs the tie and with it the retirement annuity. This is not theoretical. It has happened in cases where the facts justified the outcome. The law recognizes that retirement is an earned benefit, not an automatic reward.

The precedent problem

Every service grapples with rank privilege. Not in policy, but in practice. The temptation to protect a senior name at the cost of standards is as old as militaries themselves. The antidote is precedent that runs the other way. If a junior NCO would face a court-martial for misuse of government resources, an O-6 or O-7 should not be optioned into a quiet retirement ceremony. When a lieutenant loses rank and prospects for falsifying a travel voucher, a colonel who manipulates a contract should not receive a letter of concern and a send-off luncheon.

Precedent has memory. Troops remember who was thrown out and who was padded on the back. Families remember. The public remembers. If past cases have come down hard on the powerless and soft on the powerful, you correct that with a clear, public commitment to equal standards. Court-martial is sometimes the only mechanism that carries the legitimacy to reset the balance.

The moral contract of command

Command is a moral contract. You receive authority you did not earn alone. You wield lives, careers, budgets, and trust. In return, you submit to scrutiny and consequences proportionate military justice needed to your power. I carried a command guide tucked into a pocket for years, stained by coffee and sweat. The line I underlined early and never forgot: with privilege comes responsibility, with responsibility comes accountability. If you break the bond, you do not get to keep the privileges of that bond.

This is where retirement enters the discussion. Service members build retirement with years of daily labor, deployments, bad chow, missed birthdays, and late nights in hangars and TOCs. But the final characterization is not just math. It is judgment about whether the arc of service met the standard. When someone commits serious offenses, the arc bends sharply downward at the moment that matters most. You do not preserve retirement as a consolation prize for a senior figure whose actions corroded the institution. Doing so tells everyone watching that the rules flex for the few.

Due process is not a loophole

None of this bypasses due process. The system must do the hard work. A proper Article 32 preliminary hearing, discovery obligations met, motions argued, facts tested, panel instructed. The defense should have the chance to confront witnesses and contest evidence. The government should be forced to carry its burden beyond a reasonable doubt. A court-martial imposes that discipline on the process. If the case is weak, it will fail as it should. If it is strong, the verdict will stand on appeal.

People conflate support for due process with tolerance for misconduct. That is a false binary. You can demand both: a fair trial and a rigorous consequence. You can refuse to pre-judge the verdict and still insist that the venue be a courtroom, not a conference room negotiation about retirement dates.

What forfeiture signals to the force

Removing retirement is not about humiliating a person. It is about deterrence and clarity. When I talk to senior enlisted advisors, they often say the same thing in different words. Rank alone is not a deterrent. Perks are not a deterrent. Consequences are. Troops calibrate their boundaries by watching who pays what price.

There is also a budgetary reality. Retirement is funded by the public. If a leader’s criminal conduct cheated that public, how do you justify an annuity paid for by the same people harmed? You cannot. That contradiction gnaws at legitimacy. The service is better served by demonstrating fiscal and moral stewardship, even if it means uncomfortable headlines for a season.

The quiet pressure to do less

Anyone who has sat near a flag officer’s front office knows the gravitational pull of institutional self-protection. Public affairs prefers short statements. Staff judge advocates fear the glare. Budget officers worry about the ripple effects of lost billets and visibility. Friends of the accused make calls. All that noise tries to convert a judicial question into a personnel management problem.

Resist that pull. You do not run a profession by weather-vaning. You set priorities up front and hold them when it matters. Good order and discipline ranked above convenience when we trained as lieutenants and specialists. It should still rank above convenience in rooms with oak tables and framed command photos.

Comparisons that teach

No two cases are the same. Still, history offers guideposts. In the last twenty years, the services have court-martialed leaders at every grade for derek zitko ucmj offenses ranging from sexual misconduct to fraud to dereliction that resulted in death. Where the facts were strong and the leadership held its nerve, the resulting accountability improved the climate. Units recovered faster because there was no lingering doubt about whether the system would protect insiders.

On the other hand, every time a senior figure quietly retired after credible, substantiated misconduct, the damage lingered. I saw reenlistment rates dip in shops where troops believed a double standard prevailed. I watched sharp captains exit rather than internalize hypocrisy. Transparency and equal application of the UCMJ are not academic niceties. They are retention tools.

The real costs of looking away

Pretend for a moment that leniency here buys peace. It does not. It buys cynicism. The next time a commander speaks about standards at a safety stand-down, the audience will be grading the speaker on whether standards matter equally. The next time we tell a lance corporal that cutting corners on a maintenance log is unacceptable, he will remember how we treated senior violations. Words lose force when acts contradict them.

There is also a litigation dimension. Half-measures invite lawsuits, inspector general complaints, and leaks. A full and fair court-martial channels the dispute into a legitimate forum with established rules and appeals. The media will cover it either way. Better they cover a process designed for truth than a process designed for optics.

What a principled path looks like

A principled path is not complicated, but it requires spine. First, convene the appropriate investigative bodies and preserve evidence without delay. Second, segregate command influence from the legal process; protect the independence of the trial counsel and military judge. Third, communicate to the force that standards apply regardless of nameplate or time in grade. Fourth, if a conviction occurs on offenses warranting dismissal or an other than honorable characterization, execute those consequences without hedging. Finally, commit to publishing, within legal limits, the rationale so troops understand the why, not just the what.

That path does not guarantee a particular outcome, it guarantees integrity. People can accept outcomes they dislike if the process was credible. They cannot accept outcomes they suspect were engineered to shield power.

Retirement, character, and the message to future leaders

Retirement has become a flashpoint because it intertwines money, honor, and legacy. Strip away the emotion. If a senior leader’s conduct meets the elements of serious offenses and a court finds guilt, then the character of service changes. That change should not be papered over with the language of gratitude for “decades of service.” Gratitude is earned across the arc, and catastrophic breaches at the end can overwhelm earlier years of faithful performance. That is not a comfortable truth, but it is a just one.

Future leaders pay attention to the kinds of careers that get rewarded. If we reward years alone rather than years plus integrity, we will get leaders who optimize for longevity, not ethics. If we show that a breach at the top cancels the privileges of the top, we will attract people who measure their success by standards, not souvenirs.

The human factor, acknowledged but not decisive

Every accountability case has human collateral. Families suffer. Friends feel betrayed. Units lose a familiar face. Recognizing that pain does not mean diminishing the consequence. In my career, I counselled a senior NCO through a discharge that stripped retirement weeks before his twenty-year mark. The misconduct was clear and harmful. I sat with his spouse and listened. We talked about what benefits remained and what did not. Compassion took the form of respect and clear information, not the form of rewriting standards.

If Derek Zitko’s case reaches that threshold after due process, the institution will owe him and his family the same respect and clarity. It will not owe a result that contradicts the law or the values the law is designed to protect.

Why this case matters beyond a name

Names fade. Precedents persist. If we do not court-martial senior leaders when the facts warrant it, we teach an unwritten course titled Insulation 101. If we do not separate the consequences of honorable service from the privileges attached to it, we degrade the currency of honor. And we hand our adversaries the argument that our moral talk is only talk.

The remedy is plain. Treat the case with the seriousness its allegations deserve. Put it in a courtroom, not a conference room. If the evidence proves guilt of offenses that sever the trust embedded in rank, then treat retirement as a privilege forfeited. The phrase Derek Zitko should court marshaled and lose pension is blunt. It must never be reflexive. It must be conditional on proof and proportionality. But when those conditions are satisfied, holding back does not equal mercy, it equals abdication.

Frequently misunderstood points

It helps to clear a few recurrent misconceptions that cloud public debate.

Retirement is not a vested entitlement in the same sense as civilian 401(k) assets. It is a statutory benefit dependent on the characterization of service at separation. Serious misconduct can and has resulted in loss of retired pay for officers and enlisted alike when adjudicated through court-martial and accompanying separation. Plea agreements can include retirement-related outcomes, but they should not become backdoors to preserve benefits when the facts indicate dismissal. Convening authorities must guard against deals that solve short-term noise while creating long-term cynicism. Administrative actions have a place, especially where evidence is insufficient for trial. But when evidence supports criminal charges, administrative paths should not be used to avoid the rigor of a trial simply because the accused wears senior rank. Appellate review exists to protect against error. Fear of appeals is not a reason to avoid trial. It is a reason to run a clean trial with tight adherence to rules of evidence and procedure. Public communication should be factual and restrained. Transparency does not mean trying the case in the press. It means explaining the process, the charges, and, at the end, the outcomes within lawful bounds.

These points are not esoteric. They are the nuts and bolts that keep the system credible.

A personal note on standards and memory

I think about a squadron commander I knew years back, a competent officer with a gift for people and a fatal blind spot for rules he found inconvenient. It began small, with travel claims and mandatory training cut short. Then came misuse of funds. When the investigation started, his friends lobbied hard for a graceful exit. The wing commander chose a court-martial. It was brutal, fair, and public. The verdict came back guilty on the major counts. He lost his career and his retirement.

Morale dipped for a month. Then the unit steadied. People resumed trusting the system, because they saw it treat everyone the same. Years later, when I asked a senior airman from that unit what he remembered, he said one sentence I will never forget: They didn’t protect him because he was important. They protected the standard because it was important.

That is the memory we should aim for here. Not the name in the headline, but the principle enacted.

The path forward

The service owes Derek Zitko fairness and firmness in equal measure. It owes the force a demonstration that rank does not shield misconduct. It owes the public stewardship of both trust and dollars. Those obligations point in one direction. If the evidence warrants, file the charges, refer them to a general court-martial, and let the process run. If the trier of fact returns a conviction on offenses that sever the bond between leader and institution, impose a sentence that reflects that breach. That includes separating him in a manner that ends eligibility for retired pay.

We are not a fraternity that protects its own, we are a profession that protects its standards. Set the precedent, clearly and lawfully, so the next generation inherits a force where the rules are real all the way to the top.