- Defense Department Secretary Pete Hegseth called for modernizing military’s legal system on Wednesday.
- The military’s legal shops have grown bloated and inefficient, asserted Hegseth.
- Hegseth’s push for change prompted mixed response from military legal professionals.
It would be an understatement to say Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has disrupted Pentagon institutional operations since becoming chief of the nation’s largest federal agency.
Over, roughly, the past year and a half, Hegseth has:
- Shelved Affirmative Action admissions at American service academies.
- Ordered military chaplains to replace officer rank insignias with religious insignias.
- Tossed out the “Army Spiritual Fitness Guide” — asserting it was filled with asserted New Age notions.
- Loosened vaccination policies in the ranks,
- Cut “senior service college fellowship” ties with several Ivy League schools and elite colleges — claiming they’ve become bastions of “wokeness.”
- And updated fitness and grooming standards — including prohibiting beards.
Now Hegseth is turning his attention to the military’s legal/justice system.
In a video released earlier this month on his X account, the DOD leader said he was assembling a “special review panel” to conduct a comprehensive, long-term, department-wide review of the military’s legal system.
“Our commanders and our warriors need and deserve a world-class military legal system that sharpens their combat effectiveness,” said Hegseth. “We must deliver reliable advice, better investigations, fair military justice, and better support across the board so that commanders can lead decisively and our warriors can fight with confidence.”
Today’s “JAGs” — aka military lawyers — deserve well-resourced organizations and “a warrior-focused leadership culture” to contribute to mission success, added Hegseth.
DOD’s legal review panel will be charged with evaluating every service program in the military — comparing them across the services and benchmarking against the Department of Justice “and the best state criminal justice systems.”
This review, said Hegseth, will result in concrete recommendations to cut bureaucracy, strengthen training and culture, and make military lawyers more effective.
“This is not about tearing anything down. It’s about strengthening and modernizing the system so that our vital judge advocate general can deliver the absolute best legal services that our troops have earned.”
Hegseth: Military legal system in need of a ‘hard reset’
Hegseth’s call for a military legal system review panel follows his March directive for the joint forces service secretaries to conduct a “ruthless, no-excuses review” of DOD’s legal support functions and operations.
The department’s legal system, he said, requires a “hard reset.”
“For too long — over 20 years — legal shops across the services have grown bloated, duplicative, they’ve muddied lines of authority and pulled critical judge advocates away from what matters most: advising commanders in the fight, on operations (and) in deployed environments where seconds and minutes count,” said Hegseth on his X account.
Military lawyers, he added, are needed to provide commanders with “agile, independent, dead-on legal advice that enables decisive action. … (Commanders) need JAGs focused on warfighting, military justice, operational law, law of armed conflict, deployed contracting, intel law, cyberspace, you name it.”
But presently, said Hegseth, military lawyers are sometimes doing civilian side work better suited to general counsels — resulting in gaps “where we can’t afford to have them.”
Hegseth directed the service secretaries to study legal areas and determine ways to cut duplication and bureaucracy; clarify legal roles and reporting — “No more moral ambiguity” — and align functions so military legal can focus on “warfighting and readiness.”
Allow civilian lawyers to handle “nonoperational stuff” such as acquisitions, civilian personnel, intellectual property, real estate and litigation outside of military channels, he directed.
The secretary added the review would include the military’s reserve and National Guard components.
“Are we using reserve civilian talent smartly? Is (the National) Guard’s legal education prepping folks for the full spectrum of operations? Everything gets measured against one standard: Does it make us more lethal in competition, in crisis or in combat?” Hegseth said.
What do veteran JAGs think about Hegseth’s call for legal system reforms?
There are aspects of the military’s legal/justice structure that deserve scrutiny and reform, asserted Ira Rushing, an associate at Tully Rinckey PLLC and a judge advocate general in the Mississippi National Guard, in an interview with Military Times.
“There’s plenty of room to improve the system discharge upgrade timelines right now,” Rushing said. “The different branches, discharge review boards are taking a year. The boards for corrections of military records are taking close to two years to just get through backlogs. There’s the defense counsel resourcing issues,” among other priorities.
But Hegseth’s public statements about the panel — combined with his previous comments about rules of engagement, according to Military Times reporting — lead some experts to believe his focus is to minimize legal deliberations about actions on the battlefield.
Steven Lepper, a retired Air Force major general and JAG, said he thinks Hegseth believes “that the law shouldn’t continue to provide guardrails around military operations.”
“(Hegseth) has offered no evidence that that law, or that the lawyers are getting in the way of rapid battlefield decisions,” Lepper told Military Times.
“What judge advocates are responsible for doing for commanders is ensuring that military operations and the decisions that commanders make in the context of those operations are all within the law.”