Army’s plan for military death row executions is named ‘Operation Resolute Justice’

The Army has a plan in place for the service to carry out executions of military prisoners on death row, if execution orders are approved by President Donald Trump, officials confirmed.

Called “Operation Resolute Justice,” the plan directs the Army to coordinate with the Federal Bureau of Prisons to transport inmates from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to Federal Correctional Institution, Terre Haute, in Indiana. The plan also calls for the establishment of a viewing station for witnesses. An Army official confirmed details of the plan with Task & Purpose.

Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, or UCMJ, the president has to sign off on an execution order.

“To date, the president has not taken action on any of the three death-sentence inmates who do not have presidentially-approved death sentences,” said Cynthia Smith, an Army spokeswoman. “Exercises regarding this operation have been conducted regularly for the past twenty years. These drills are a standard component of our continued planning and preparation if the president approves a death sentence.”

The facility at Terre Haute has been the site of all federal executions since 2001. However, the last time the U.S. military carried out an execution was in 1961.

There are currently four former soldiers on the mil­i­tary’s death row who are housed at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, which is managed by the Army. The former soldiers, Timothy Hennis, Nidal Hasan, Ronald Gray and Hasan Akbar, were all found guilty of murder, some in mass scenes of violence, others in more personal crimes.

In January 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order “restoring the death penalty.” The administration also rescinded a moratorium on federal executions and is seeking death sentences against 44 defendants, according to Department of Justice officials.

A Department of Defense official reportedly told the Daily Caller in 2025 that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was looking for approval from President Donald Trump to move forward with the execution of Nidal Hasan, a former Army major, who was sentenced to death in 2013.

In 2009, Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, entered a Fort Hood, Texas, medical facility and shouted “Allahu akbar” — “God is great,” in Arabic — before shooting and killing 13 people, and wounding dozens more. Hasan was paralyzed after he was shot by police who responded to the attack. At trial, Hasan, an American-born Muslim of Palestinian descent, admitted to being the shooter. He described himself at trial as a soldier who was on the “wrong side of America’s war on Islam” and that he had “switched sides.” In 2013, he told a panel of military mental health experts that the death penalty offered him salvation and that he “would still be a martyr.”

The oldest military death row case involves former Army Spc. Ronald Gray, which dates back decades. In 1988, Gray was con­vict­ed by a gen­er­al court-mar­tial of 14 charges, includ­ing pre­med­i­tat­ed mur­der, attempt­ed mur­der, and of raping three women, two of whom were soldiers. In 2008, President George W. Bush signed off on his execution order, but it was later challenged in federal court and in 2016 a judge lifted the hold on his execution order. In 2017, an Army court rejected his final appeal.

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Another one of the death row inmates is Army Sgt. Hasan Akbar, who was con­vict­ed of attempted and actual pre­med­i­tat­ed mur­der in a 2003 hand grenade and shooting attack at Camp Pennsylvania, Kuwait. Akbar was charged with killing an Army captain, an Air Force major, and wounding 14 others. In May, Defense Secretary Hegseth awarded Purple Hearts to 9 veterans injured in that attack.

Former Master Sgt. Timothy Hennis was convicted in a North Carolina court in 1985 for a triple murder involving a woman and two chil­dren while he was a soldier at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The state supreme court overturned his conviction, arguing that the repeated projected pictures during the trial could have unfairly swayed the jury. He was acquitted in 1989.

Hennis reenlisted and served until 2004, when he retired as a master sergeant. Preserved DNA evidence was used as proof against him in a set of UCMJ charges and he was tried again for those murders. In 2010, a military court-martial sentenced him to death. A petition for a retrial at the Supreme Court was denied in 2021. In court filings, his defense counsel wrote that the case appeared to make history for imposing the death penalty after an acquittal, a court-martial sentencing a military retiree to death, and invoking double jeopardy, or trying Hennis for the same crime twice — “putting that same citizen in jeopardy yet again— and to take his life, no less.”

All four soldiers have had their petitions for Supreme Court consideration denied in the last decade.

‘It takes some political will to do this’

Military legal experts told Task & Purpose that while troops have continued to receive death sentences under the UCMJ, presidents have largely lacked the political resolve to sign off on them.

“It takes some political will to do this,” said Frank Rosenblatt, president of the National Institute of Military Justice. “I think that George W. Bush was too busy waging wars abroad. Barack Obama had no inclination to either execute or grant clemency, except in one case, and in the first Trump administration, it just never was enough of a priority for the president to say, ‘Yes. Let’s go ahead and do this.’”

From 1916 to 1961, the military executed 135 people. While a court-martial can result in a death sentence, the last military execution took place in 1961 when Army Pvt. John A. Bennett, a 19-year-old soldier, was hanged at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for the rape and attempted murder of an 11-year-old Austrian girl. In addition to the lack of executions carried out in recent decades, the majority of death sentences in the military have also been overturned.