If you’re still not sure whether the United States is at risk of sliding into authoritarianism, talk to some Americans who know all about the proper and improper uses of violence. They are the men and women who are or were in the military’s so-called Judge Advocate General’s Corps.
Independent and apolitical lawyers in uniform, these so-called JAGs advise the commanders of the world’s mightiest war machine about how to comply with domestic and international law — everything from the Uniform Code of Military Justice to the Geneva Conventions — when deploying America’s awe-inspiring lethality.
“Lethality” is of course the favorite word of Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, or rather (since President Donald Trump renamed the department) the secretary of “war.” But Rachel VanLandingham, who as a JAG used to advise generals including David Petraeus in places such as Afghanistan and now teaches at Southwestern Law School, told me that Hegseth’s obsession with lethality is “sophomoric” because it reduces the US military to his vision of “the warrior dude on Fortnite.” Worse, she told me, he in effect “repudiates the concept that killing should only be done as a last resort.”
Hegseth, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, has indeed spent years campaigning against JAGs — whom he likes to call “jagoffs” — and often seems to question the principle of legal or ethical restraints on warfare. Before he became secretary, he was a TV personality on Fox & Friends, where he lobbied Trump during his first term on behalf of two American soldiers and a Navy SEAL who were accused or convicted of war crimes. (Trump pardoned the soldiers and reversed the demotion of the SEAL).
Soon after he was sworn in, Hegseth fired the top judge advocates of the army, navy and air force, calling them “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander-in-chief.” (In fact, JAGs can’t block anything; they only advise and present legal options and consequences, while commanders decide.) At the time, the dismissals received relatively little attention, because Hegseth simultaneously purged other top brass in his ongoing war against what he has called “DEI/Woke shit.”
That round of staff moves was only the beginning of his campaign to change the JAG Corps beyond recognition. Hegseth made his personal lawyer (who had also defended that SEAL accused of a war crime) a commander in the navy’s JAG Corps, with a brief to remold it. Prospective JAGs are now said to receive ideological litmus tests. Hegseth has lowered the rank requirement from three to two stars, in effect making the corps more junior. He plans to transfer hundreds of JAGs outside of the military to become immigration judges, shrinking the corps. The pressure on JAGs seems immense — the replacement of the air force JAG whom Hegseth fired in February is also leaving.
Hegseth’s disdain for JAGs fits a pattern of contempt for accountability and oversight. His department recently tried to force accredited journalists to pledge not to use any information that the Pentagon hadn’t officially approved, making a mockery of the fourth estate.(1) Hegseth is also restricting the communications between Pentagon employees and Congress. And he’s clamping down on inspectors general, the watchdogs that are meant to investigate waste, fraud and abuse in the military branches.
The former JAGs I spoke to told me that his vitriol toward their profession is worse because it shows that Hegseth confuses lethality with lawlessness. They point to the American air strikes off the coasts of Venezuela and Colombia as examples of what is to come.
For two months, the US has been bombing vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific and killing the civilians aboard, claiming that they are narco-traffickers but offering no evidence. “The boat strikes constitute murder,” Eugene R. Fidell told me. He used to be a JAG in the Coast Guard and is now at Yale Law School. The entire operation amounts to “treating the world as a free-fire zone,” he said.
Conversations between commanders and JAGs aren’t public. But it is notable that just as the strikes ramped up, Admiral Alvin Holsey, who is said to have expressed concerns about the operation’s legality, stepped down as head of US Southern Command, which oversees operations in Central and South America. He was less than a year into what is typically a three-year term.
Fidell is equally concerned about deployments of the National Guard in American cities that just happen to be “blue” and thus fit Trump’s descriptions of domestic enemies. “The country is being groomed to see nothing odd in people in uniforms on our streets,” Fidell told me.
Ever since its founding, America has defined lawfulness, and thus legitimacy, as a strategic advantage in warfare. It is no coincidence that most democracies and allies have legal institutions analogous to the JAG Corps, whereas autocracies such as China, Russia and North Korea don’t.
When America betrayed its own principles, moreover, it often also lost the war. “Think My Lai, Abu Ghraib, and more,” Charles Dunlap told me in an email. He was a JAG in the air force and now runs the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke University Law School. “Every serious analyst will tell you that such ‘legal defeats’ typically caused more strategic harm to the military effort than most tactical battlefield losses.”
Another former JAG, who is still in the Pentagon, told me he thinks that the American boat strikes in the Caribbean are legally more egregious than, say, China’s bullying of Philippine boats in the South China Sea: “In terms of transparency, human rights, due process, and rule of law, remind me which is the democratic republic and which the totalitarian regime?”
Morale in the JAG Corp is at an all-time low, he told me: “We’re heading in the direction of a political commissariat” and becoming “the Soviet army of yore.”
We’re not there yet, of course. But as a mighty American armada gathers near Venezuela, and troops patrol more US cities, it is high time that Americans revisit the proper relationship between violence and credibility, lethality and legitimacy, might and right. At home and abroad, the choice is between rule of men or rule of law.
(1) Most legacy media organizations (even including Fox News) refused and walked out; the outlets that agreed are seen as friendly if not fawning.
This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.
Disclaimer: This report is auto generated from the Bloomberg news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.
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