UCMJ Article 110: Improper Hazarding of a Vessel or Aircraft

Few offenses in the Uniform Code of Military Justice carry the weight of Article 110. It is one of the small handful of UCMJ provisions for which death remains an authorized punishment, and it sits at the intersection of two things the armed forces guard most closely: the safety of the crews who operate their ships and aircraft, and the enormous value of the platforms themselves. Codified at 10 U.S.C. 910, Article 110 punishes a service member who endangers a military vessel or aircraft, and it draws a sharp line between doing so deliberately and doing so through carelessness. Understanding that line is the key to understanding the entire article.

The conduct the article reaches

The statute is built around a single verb: to hazard. Article 110(a) addresses the person who “willfully and wrongfully, hazards or suffers to be hazarded any vessel or aircraft of the armed forces.” Article 110(b) reaches the person who “negligently hazards or suffers to be hazarded” such a vessel or aircraft. In both branches the phrase “suffers to be hazarded” is doing real work. It means a service member can violate the article not only by an affirmative act that places the platform in danger but also by failing to prevent a danger that duty required the member to prevent. A watch officer who lets a ship steam toward a charted shoal has suffered the vessel to be hazarded just as surely as one who orders the wrong heading.

Two points about scope are worth fixing at the outset. First, the article covers both vessels and aircraft of the armed forces. The reference to aircraft reflects the modern statute as recodified under the Military Justice Act of 2016, which broadened the older offense beyond ships alone. Second, the platform must belong to the armed forces. Endangering a private vessel or a commercial aircraft may be a crime under other provisions, but it is not Article 110.

What it means to “hazard”

The governing definition is narrow and deliberate. To hazard means to put in danger of loss or injury. The offense is complete when the vessel or aircraft is exposed to that danger; the government need not prove that the ship actually ran aground, that the aircraft actually crashed, or that anyone was hurt. Because the danger itself is the harm, a grounding that causes no lasting damage, a near-collision avoided at the last moment, or a flight conducted outside safe parameters can each support a charge if the conduct placed the platform in genuine peril.

This focus on exposure rather than outcome is what makes the article so consequential at sea and in the air, where the consequences of a mistake unfold quickly and at scale. A modern warship or military aircraft represents a concentration of personnel and capability that the law treats as worth protecting before disaster strikes, not only after.

The elements the government must prove

The proof required tracks the two branches of the statute. For the willful and wrongful offense, the prosecution must establish that a vessel or aircraft of the armed forces was hazarded in a certain manner, and that the accused, by specified acts or omissions, willfully and wrongfully caused or suffered it to be hazarded. For the negligent offense, the first element is identical, and the second substitutes a negligent mental state for the willful and wrongful one. In each case the charge must identify the particular manner of hazarding, because the danger is the heart of the offense and must be pleaded with specificity.

The defined terms carry the distinction. Willfully means intentionally. Wrongfully means contrary to law, regulation, lawful order, or custom. The two together describe a service member who knew what they were doing and did it without justification. Negligence, by contrast, means the failure to exercise the care, prudence, or attention to duties that the interests of the government require a prudent and reasonable person to exercise under the circumstances. The negligent offender does not intend to endanger the ship; the offender simply fails to meet the standard of care that the responsibility demanded.

Maximum punishment, and why the mental state matters so much

Nowhere in the UCMJ does the difference between intent and carelessness produce a wider gap in exposure. Willful and wrongful hazarding is punishable by death or such other punishment as a court-martial may direct. It is one of the rare non-homicide offenses for which capital punishment remains theoretically available, a measure of how seriously the law regards the deliberate endangerment of a warship or military aircraft and the lives aboard. Negligent hazarding carries a maximum of a dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and confinement for two years.

That contrast is not academic. Because the same physical event, a grounding or a collision, can be charged either way depending on the proof of mental state, the question of whether the accused acted intentionally or merely carelessly often becomes the central battleground of the case. Negligent hazarding is recognized as a lesser included offense of the willful and wrongful version, so a panel that is not persuaded the conduct was deliberate may still convict on the negligent branch. As with other offenses, sentences for conduct committed on or after 27 December 2023 are imposed by the military judge under the sentencing parameters of the current Manual for Courts-Martial, and any specific figure should be confirmed against that Manual at the time of the offense.

How hazarding cases actually arise

In practice, Article 110 is most closely associated with the sea services, where command of a watch carries direct responsibility for the safe navigation of the vessel. Groundings, collisions, allisions with fixed objects, and other navigational mishaps are the classic fact patterns. When a Navy vessel runs aground or collides with another ship, the inquiry typically asks whether the officer of the deck, the navigator, or the commanding officer failed in the duties that safe operation required, and whether that failure rose to negligence or something worse. The same logic extends to aircraft, where deviation from established flight procedures or controlled operation outside safe limits can place an airframe and crew in danger.

The recurring theme is duty. Because the offense can be committed by suffering the platform to be hazarded, liability often turns on what the accused was responsible for and whether reasonable attention to those responsibilities would have prevented the danger. A service member with no navigational duty who happens to be aboard a ship that grounds is not, without more, an offender under Article 110; the person who held the duty to keep the vessel safe is the natural subject of the charge.

Defenses and the contested questions

Because the elements are precise, the defenses tend to attack them one at a time. A frequent line of defense is that the conduct, whatever its result, did not meet the standard for negligence at all, that the accused exercised the care a prudent person would have exercised and that the mishap flowed from equipment failure, unforeseeable conditions, the acts of others, or simple misfortune rather than any breach of duty. Where the charge is willful and wrongful hazarding, the defense will often concede nothing more than negligence, contesting the intentional and unjustified state of mind that the aggravated branch requires.

Causation is another battleground. The accused’s acts or omissions must have caused or suffered the platform to be hazarded, so a defense may argue that an intervening cause, a mechanical defect, a navigational chart error, or another person’s independent failure, severed the connection between the accused’s conduct and the danger. And because hazarding requires real exposure to danger, the defense may contest whether the vessel or aircraft was ever actually placed in danger of loss or injury, as opposed to merely operating in conditions that, in hindsight, looked alarming but never crossed into genuine peril.

Sources

• 10 U.S.C. 910 (UCMJ Art. 110, Improper hazarding of vessel or aircraft): https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/910
• Manual for Courts-Martial, United States, Part IV (Punitive Articles), Article 110: https://jsc.defense.gov/Military-Law/Current-Publications-and-Updates/
• United States v. Henderson, 59 M.J. 350 (C.A.A.F. 2004) (elements and lesser-included relationship under Art. 110), via the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces: https://www.armfor.uscourts.gov/

This article is for general informational purposes only and is not legal advice. It describes military law and procedure of public record, does not address any individual case, and does not create an attorney-client relationship.