Star Trek's General Order 24 Lets a Captain Wipe Out a Planet, and Starfleet Has Never Banned It

A lot of people hate Section 31 and say it goes against what Star Trek has always stood for. I have always found that a little funny, because Section 31 was never really the exception to the rule. They were just more honest.

That capability has a name: General Order 24. It is one of the most contradictory orders in the Federation, presented on screen as a tool Starfleet captains can aim at enemies of the Federation. To put it plainly, Starfleet has an order that allows a captain to kill every man, woman, and child on a planet.

General Order 24 has been invoked at least three times on screen

The first instance comes from the original series, where Kirk orders General Order 24 and gives a two hour deadline, using it as leverage. Whether he ever intended to carry it out is not something we know for certain. When I watch it, I get the feeling he never intended to do it, but in the end we honestly do not know. That is the kindest interpretation available.

The second instance is in the episode Whom Gods Destroy, where Garth invokes the order against Antos IV. Garth had genuine intent, but was categorically insane.

The third and most recent instance comes from Strange New Worlds, where an admiral justifies invoking the order because of an attack on a Federation colony. The justifications across all three range from insane to something you could at least argue is self-defense, but every single one of them is an extreme. Even in the most reasonable case, Strange New Worlds, I found it hard to fully justify what was quite literally genocide.

Strange New Worlds shows the order used by someone who is not a madman

In the Strange New Worlds episode Orders of Magnitude, an admiral takes command of a starship after the Vendikar massacre, described as an unprovoked attack on a Federation colony with 5 million civilian casualties, with long range scans showing the attack was carried out by one ship. He invokes General Order 24 to destroy a civilian population of over 5,000 people. I expect there will be critics of Strange New Worlds who attack this scene, treating it as Discovery era writers misusing Trek mythology, but this is actually how the order is supposed to be used, and it is being given by an admiral who is not crazy and does not have a gun to his head.

His reasoning, at least to everyone on the ship, is treated as legitimate, and I want to emphasize that part. The doubt in the room is not about whether killing 5,000 people is acceptable. It is only because the order is personal to him, tied to his family, and because there is a little uncertainty about whether these people were even helping the attackers. Most everyone on that ship appears okay with the order itself. They are not arguing that point.

A character even says the reason it should not have happened is because they are not completely sure, not that they should never do it at all. I agree you should know if someone is innocent or guilty. But being guilty probably does not mean you need to kill an entire population in one strike. This is the first time we see the order used not as a bluff, not coming from a madman, but from someone with what looks like a legitimate use case, and that, in my opinion, makes the order horrific.

Starfleet never removes the order, it only removes the officer

Looking at how each case gets handled, the pattern is consistent. Kirk's use is a possible bluff. Garth had genuine intent but was insane. And in Strange New Worlds, the admiral had genuine intent and was never stopped until it was exposed that he was doing it out of revenge. Had it been carried out as policy, with a little more evidence, there apparently would not have been an issue at all.

The most telling detail for me is that the order is never repealed after any of these events. Starfleet's answer is never to remove the order because of the damage it could do, but just to stop that particular officer. That is damning, because you cannot get mad at the military for using a policy it was given, unless of course you are the character who insists Starfleet is not a military organization and its purpose is exploration. If you hand a tool to people in a military structure, they will use it, so the institution that authorized the tool is the one worth being angry at.

The only safeguard against it barely works, and it took poisoning an admiral to trigger it

When I looked at what Starfleet could actually do to stop this order if it wanted to, the only mechanism I could find was Starfleet Order 104, section C, command fitness. But it has never been used cleanly. In the Strange New Worlds case, it only worked because the admiral had been drugged, giving everyone a way to frame it as a command fitness issue rather than confronting the order itself.

That is terrifying to me. A man decides to destroy an entire population, and the fact that he wants to destroy an entire population is not reason enough on its own for a command fitness review. They have to literally poison him for the mechanism to work. That tells us how Starfleet reacts to the order, given that it is still viable as far back as Kirk's era.

Looking at all this, Section 31 comes out looking more moral than Starfleet itself

I started by talking about Section 31 and how Starfleet is on par with it. The more I look into General Order 24, the more I land on one conclusion: Section 31 is more moral. Their actions target verifiable threats to the Federation, and everything they do is on par with what this general order can accomplish, except they wield it against an enemy they already know is an enemy or will eventually become one.

Starfleet as an institution allows its captains to take this measure, and there is no good safeguard against it. Because there is no good safeguard, it gets used recklessly. Honestly, even if a good safeguard existed, an institution like Starfleet, one that is supposed to represent the evolved human being above everything, should not have this order available at all. Three officers, three different reasons, and one order that was never taken off the table, even though it is effectively genocide and can be used for evil.

I get a lot of grief for being critical of Starfleet, but looking at policies like this and what they imply, do you actually blame me?