According to two people familiar with the issue, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegses is expected to begin an overhaul of the Judge-Advocated General General’s sweep in the coming weeks.
The change is poised to affect the entire military, as Hegses’ office considers changes in the interpretation of US engagement rules on the battlefield regarding the way in which charges are brought about under the military justice system.
The Department of Defense is currently in the process of nominating a new Judge Advocate General (JAGS) for the Army, Navy and Air Force after Hegses fired his predecessor at a late-night purge last month, with overhauls not expected to begin until they are in place.
However, rebuilding the JAG legion will prioritize Friday commissioning his personal lawyer and former naval officer Tim Palator as naval commander and overseeing efforts to carry the weight and authority of the Secretary of Defense Office.
The committee is a reserve soldier of the JAG Corps, and he will continue his private practices outside of his military duties. Palatol previously defended Donald Trump for misunderstanding former Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher on a war crime charge.
The JAG Corps overhaul is intended to retrain military lawyers, people said. So they offer broader legal advice to pursue more aggressive tactics and take a more generous approach when charging soldiers for battlefield crime.
Part of that approach reflects Parlatore’s view on JAG executives. He said he effectively involved his associates in decision-making and did not exercise discretion in determining charges to include in military prosecution.
One complaint is that Jags were too restrictive to interpret the rules of involvement, taking the requirement that soldiers identify the soldiers needed to identify the targets to open the target before they could actively identify them as enemy combatants.
The Department of Defense did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
People said criticism of the JAG legions came from both Hegseth and Parlatore. Hegseth has made the rules of engagement a doctrine of how he intends to guide the Department of Defense, and the need to restore the “warrior spirit” to the leaders of the US military, which he considers soft.
Some of these rules were deliberate policy changes by the US military after senior officers such as General David Petraeus began to believe that civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan were opposing the local population against the US military and drawing support from the enemy.
However, in his book “Wars with Warriors,” Hegses sent lawyers with “Jagovs” to express his dissatisfaction with the laws of armed conflict, allowing the enemy to win battlefield victory for frontline soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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And in Trump’s first term, Fox and his friend’s host, Hegus appealed to Trump to mercy any US soldiers accused of committing war crimes, including Gallagher, who was accused of killing prisoner of Islamic State fighter planes in Mosul.
Hegzes’ views expressed in his book are shared by Paratol, who saw the Gallagher case as an example of enthusiastic prosecution, suggesting that the JAG legion could be reformed due to his experience as both a former officer and a defense attorney.
Palatol made it clear that even if the US enemies ignore them, they are not pushing for the United States to not adhere to the Geneva Convention and the Uniform Law of Military Justice. But people said he was going to change how they are interpreted.
Jags’ legal status was often perplexed when he resisted the administration’s view that the Jags could legally direct the military to ignore the Geneva treaty when dealing with detainees, including the George W. Bush administration after the September 11th terrorist attacks.
The Bush administration argued that it was taking legal interpretations of the Department of Justice and attempted to subjugate military lawyers from deliberation before subjugating them to civilian presidents politically appointed for their branches.
In 2004, Congress passed laws that have become illegal for anyone in the Pentagon, preventing Jagu from obstructing his ability to “give independent legal advice” to secretaries and chiefs for branches. However, it did not constrain the reforms of the JAG army from within.
