Owen’s and McCollum’s dark, poetic memories of World War I (WWI) captured the horror of new weapons that drove treaty law in the years that followed. But not all new technologies that found their way onto WWI’s battlefields required new laws. On today’s battlefields, the continuous, relentless development of new technologies and weapons, and their employment to impose one’s political will on adversaries, remains the same. Today’s judge advocates face new intellectual challenges in addressing threats in a new domain—cyberspace.

On 8 August 2018, Lieutenant General Charles N. Pede delivered the following remarks at Somme American Cemetery near Bony, France, during a remembrance ceremony which was part of the World War I Centennial Commemorations:

It happens every year—staff judge advocates (SJAs), regional defense counsel, and senior JAG Corps leaders across components gather at The Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School for a week of professional discourse and knowledge sharing.

When the Congress declared war on Germany and the other Central Powers on 6 April 1917, America’s Army was ill-prepared to fight what would later be called the “Great War.” After all, the entire Army consisted of 125,000 Regular Army Soldiers and 67,000 National Guardsmen along the Mexican border. Moreover, the Army was built around regiments; larger units such as divisions, corps, and armies existed only on paper. But, by the time what we now call World War I ended, on 11 November 1918—just nineteen months later—the Army had grown to 3.7 million, with two million men serving in the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in France.

On 16 August 2018, The Judge Advocate General of the Army (TJAG)—Lieutenant General (LTG) Charles N. Pede—honored Mr. Aubrey Daniel with Distinguished Member status in our Regiment. Daniel, who served as a judge advocate captain in the late 1960s and early 1970s, is best known as the lead trial counsel in United States v. Calley. This court-martial, tried at Fort Benning in 1971, was the only successful criminal prosecution arising out of war crimes committed by Soldiers at the village of My Lai in Vietnam on 16 March 1968.

Paralegal PV2 Emily Stith began shooting seriously when she was thirteen years old. In the six years since, she has medaled in five international competitions. She now has the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in her sights. We interviewed Stith recently about her interest in shooting and the challenges of training for the Olympics while serving in the JAG Corps.

We tend to analyze people and events by using assumptions to fill in the gaps. This tendency is exactly why Military Rule of Evidence (M.R.E. or Rule) 4042 and related rules exist. We so often judge others by context or past behavior that a logical check is needed to ensure that we move beyond assumptions, and consider the actual evidence at hand. Hence, M.R.E. 404 normally prohibits use of a person’s character or character trait to prove that on a particular occasion the person acted in accordance with the character or trait.3

In June 2014, Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, fell to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared a global caliphate from its ruins. Behind an international coalition of 60 nations, led by the United States, and a fighting force numbering more than one hundred thousand, the Government of Iraq liberated Mosul approximately three years later in July 2017. The Battle of Mosul marked the effective end of ISIS’s caliphate and heralded the movement’s eventual defeat in Iraq.

Buried deep in Army Regulation (AR) 27-10, Military Justice, Table 3-1, footnote 4, is this sentence: “Only if imposed by a field grade commander of a unit authorized a commander in the grade of O-5 or higher.”1 This sentence refers specifically to a field grade commander’s ability to punish noncommissioned officers (NCOs) in the grades of E-5 and E-6 by reducing them one grade through nonjudicial punishment (NJP) proceedings.

In fiscal year 2017, Army legal assistance offices saw approximately 116,000 cases. Of that large number, over 31,000 related to family law.1 That is 31,000 instances where an attorney meets a family law client for the first time. That is the equivalent of almost two divisions’ worth of complicated and emotional files. In some eighteen years of practice, both civilian and military, encompassing active and National Guard duty, I have seen initial client meetings take numerous forms. Further, in a former life within the corporate world, I was often a “client” as the litigation manager.