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Regarding the "Military Justice Improvement and Increasing Prevention Act", which would "remove the decision to prosecute serious crimes in the military from the chain of command", CJCS Milley said this:
It is my professional opinion that removing commanders from prosecution decisions, process and accountability may have an adverse effect on readiness, mission accomplishment, good order and discipline, justice, unit cohesion, trust and loyalty between commanders and those they lead.
Which is pretty much the extent of every defense I've seen recounted in the media. If anyone has written a book, essay, or academic paper explaining why any of these things depend on a commander's prosecution power, I haven't seen it.
I suppose I could construct an argument for "mission accomplishment" that went something like this: combat operations won't stop for us to adjudicate every intra-unit conflict by standards of individual justice. Commanders must have the latitude to subordinate every other consideration, including due process and victims' rights, to defeating the enemy.
But I've never seen that argument spelled out, and in any case I have seen no evidence that any commander would actually do this. Not once in 30 years have I heard a commander, in explaining "his" policy on sexual assault and harassment, say: "I intend to be judicious. I will take into account full context, be proportional in my response, and apply a balancing test." Commanders only ever say one thing: zero tolerance. I can't cite an AFI, but I'm pretty sure no deviation from ZT would be honored by higher echelons of command even if one level did try to articulate it.
The the claim for "trust" is laughable. I personally haven't trusted a commander since 2003, and after what we've just seen in Afghanistan, I wouldn't recommend that anyone would take a commander's word for so much as the spelling of his own name. Can today's recruit survive so much as Basic Training, let alone a deployment, without learning complete cynicism about the lot of them and their integrity and competence?
So if the stated reasons are nonsense, then what's the hidden reason? The question bears answering. The uniformed "leadership" of the "armed" "services" has been more unified on this issue in the teeth of Congressional and now Presidential pressure than I would have thought possible.
My best guess (because it's the only consideration that ever matters nowadays) is that centralizing this power would make it obvious that NAMs generally and blacks particularly are vastly overrepresentative among perpetrators of these kinds of offenses, that the brass knows this, and that they desperately want to hide it.
3 comments:
I wrote a scathing separation letter in resigning my commission in 1993. I was told that if I submitted the letter as written I would receive a very negative separation evaluation. Since I had thought that I might want to work in the federal government or related industry I withdrew my letter. I received a very negative separation evaluation. In hindsight I should have then sent my original letter to my Congressman with an explanation but it didn't occur to me at that point. Trust a commanding officer? Nope.
Wow. Generally, commanders and supervisors avoid the extra review process associated with negative evaluations when it's so much easier to damn you with faint praise.
I guess I had forgotten that you had been in the service. Did you ever work for the federal government? I don't recall that my actual evaluations were ever a factor in my own hiring.
I never did. I had thought that maybe the nuclear power industry (my Navy background) but went in other directions. I also had no actual knowledge of whether my military evaluations would be accessible or relevant, it was just what I was told (nascent-internet days).
I suspect the reason they made a big deal was because I called out their leadership directly. With examples.
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