COL Blackwell administers the Counsel’s Oath to the 221st OBC on 14 December 2023 at TJAGLCS in Charlottesville, VA. (Credit: Billie Suttles, TJAGLCS)
Closing Argument
Building Tomorrow’s JAG Corps
Prioritizing Excellence
By Colonel Tonya L. Blackwell
During a recent conversation with colleagues about building and shaping the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps of tomorrow, someone brought up a quote attributed to the famed football coach Vince Lombardi. He once said to his team, “Gentlemen, we are going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it, because nothing is perfect. But we are going to relentlessly chase it, because in the process we will catch excellence. I am not remotely interested in just being good.”1 What Lombardi called for begs a few questions. What is perfection versus excellence versus just good? What does a relentless chase look like? How does one know if one is in such pursuit? Why should we seek perfection if it is futile? And why is just good not good enough? Thoughtful answers to these questions inform a larger question existentially important to the JAG Corps: why does professional excellence matter?
Excellence matters because it underwrites who we must be.2 As stakeholders in the most consequential practice of law, we must be the best we can possibly be in service of our Nation’s defense. Because standards set expectations, and expectations shape achievements, a team that desires to be excellent must keep their sights set on perfection despite the impossibility of ever completely capturing it.3 In the military we have a saying about doing or being “what right looks like.” Sometimes, what right looks like is good, though not great. But to aim low from the start, to desire to be merely good or good enough, runs the risk of even greater mediocrity.
Luckily, most military legal professionals readily understand the difference between just good and truly excellent. The real rub is in the relentless chase—to doggedly pursue standards so high that we know we will never quite meet them, yet have enough trust in the process to stay the course. For a championship team, to strive continuously for excellence is like a journey on a road to victory. This road is long and fraught with as many opportunities for failure as success. Such a journey demands much patience, resilience, and diligence. Determined travelers do not passively march along. Convicted by commitment, they drive on with urgency, propelling themselves forward toward the finish line with outstretched hands. Whether the road takes them through even ground or steep uphill climbs, on sunny days and in brutal storms, these travelers of excellence maintain their inner fire and relentlessly stay the course toward their goals.
For the JAG Corps to “catch” professional excellence now, later, and always, we are obliged with individual and collective responsibility to provide a foundation for, and development of, this relentless pursuit of the highest goals. The Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School (TJAGLCS) has long been, and remains, a critical element in laying this firm foundation for excellence. As a partner with you on our championship team, we press forward, together in our persistent journey toward excellence for as long as the mission demands.
How We Came to Be
In October 1950, the JAG Corps facilitated its first Judge Advocate Officer Basic Course (JAOBC) at a temporary school set up at Fort Myer, Virginia.4 The next year, the Army established a permanent school for judge advocates (JAs) on the grounds of the University of Virginia.5 The 7th JAOBC was the first to train at The Judge Advocate General’s School, newly established in Charlottesville.6 Supporting every subsequent JAOBC, including the current 224th JAOBC, the now-TJAGLCS7 in Charlottesville continues to steadfastly serve as our regimental home and the seat of our foundational learning.
Over its seventy-three-year history, TJAGLCS has evolved in size and scope to expertly meet the changing needs of the Army.8 From continued technological advances in warfare to statutory changes in military justice, the Army’s need for dedicated, well-trained legal professionals who provide engaged and effective principled counsel and premier legal services worldwide has only grown.9 No longer only facilitating JAOBC and impacting the field well beyond the U.S. Army Judge Advocate Legal Services (JALS) personnel, TJAGLCS educates and trains military and Civilian legal professionals and senior leaders from all branches of the military and the Federal Government across a multitude of practice areas and services.10
How We Continue
Our history demonstrates time and time again that the JAG Corps’s four constants of principled counsel, servant leadership, mastery of the law, and stewardship have always been the driving force behind our vision for the future. Since the establishment of the JAG Corps, our operational environment has always been an ever-evolving and dynamic landscape, and our response has always been to remain resolute in our guiding principles and purpose. From the very first JAOBC, our constants have been timeless, passed from one generation to the next, inspiring and shaping our purpose.
Building on the foundations laid by our predecessors, as faithful stewards of our profession, we are keenly aware of our duty to deliberately engage and invest in the JAG Corps of tomorrow. Benjamin Franklin is credited with having once quipped that “[i]f everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking.”11 With that in mind, we endeavor to sharpen and hone each student both individually and collectively to independently understand and fully embrace who we are, what we do, and how we do it. We equip legal professionals and senior leaders with learning that empowers the most important asset of a JA: their mind—thoroughly immersing them in knowledge and instruction to enable them to engage the mission at every level throughout the formation.
As the preeminent institution for legal education in the Federal Government, we are dedicated to inspiring the relentless pursuit of excellence both throughout and on behalf of the JAG Corps. With over 6,000 in-person and over 10,000 online students attending more than sixty-nine iterations of forty-two innovative legal courses a year, excellence at all echelons matters. As stewards of the JAG Corps, each of the thirty-six professors, from all Services, is hand-selected for the unique opportunity to educate and inspire legal personnel and commanders for service and to ensure they are educationally qualified for continued career progression through critical professional military education, certification, and functional courses.
Training Legal Personnel for Tomorrow’s Army
For most JALS personnel, the first educational interaction with TJAGLCS takes place at the beginning of their JAG Corps career. Deeply committed to the excellence of our Corps, we are responsible and accountable for inspiring, developing, and preparing newly accessed JAs, legal administrators, and court reporters for their first duty assignment. At approximately the seven-year point in their careers, our JAs return home for the Graduate Course, where we further develop and inspire them for increasingly complex service in positions of greater responsibility across our broad spectrum of JAG Corps core competencies.
Relentless and passionate in our dedication to our students, we diligently train and provide unparalleled knowledge for each to take back to their respective operational spaces. We ensure each individual is capable and qualified to practice in all the core competencies and ready to meet the immediate demand for both their legal acumen and leadership.
In the continued pursuit of excellence in learning, JALS personnel return to TJAGLCS throughout their career for functional courses, as touchpoints, to receive invaluable continuing legal education to maintain their educational qualification and continual career progression. They also return for certification courses to prepare them for critical roles such as special victims’ counsel and military judge. In meeting the demand, TJAGLCS excels in delivering substantive mission-focused expertise in all core disciplines to enable each student to successfully provide principled legal counsel, lead within their formation, and make everyone around them better. For example, there are many chiefs of justice in the field today; however, there is only one chief of justice in each Office of the Staff Judge Advocate. As such, we expect our students to not only expertly handle the work arising within their jurisdiction, but also to ensure that the quality of legal work is uniformly calibrated to the highest standard from jurisdiction to jurisdiction across the whole Army footprint.
TJAGLCS steadfastly serves as our regimental home and the seat of our foundational learning. (Photo courtesy of TJAGLCS)
Extending Specialized Support Beyond Our Corps
This leads to our commitment to relentlessly pursue excellence in our teaching to ensure the education and training we provide is specifically tailored to our military and Civilian professionals across all ranks, jobs, and disciplines. As we build upon the JAG Corps’s expertise, we also train senior commanders from throughout the Army to support successful operations. Working with commanders further strengthens the relationship and integration between legal personnel, the commander, and the commander’s staff. To expand our expertise in teaching, we invest in resources to not only build a mastery of the law but also holistically develop our strategic planning through the Legal Center.12 We build partnerships across the Department of Defense with the other Services and strengthen ties with our partners and allies. We promote common values by hosting international students in our Basic and Graduate Courses. We also invite renowned and accomplished scholars and leaders to speak to our students and collaborate with our professors. After every course and special event, we incorporate student feedback to sustain excellence and target improvement. We refuse to become stagnant and persistently look beyond ourselves and our current success to address the emerging needs of the Army and legal offices in the field.
Through our steadfast educational endeavors, we build the JAG Corps of tomorrow. Like our storied predecessors who richly invested in the pursuit of excellence with the hope of benefiting future generations of JAs and the JALS community, we may not see with perfect fidelity today what our Corps will look like in thirty, fifty, or 100 years. However, we refuse to just be good. We relentlessly drive to be the absolute best we can be, and by accepting the series of singular opportunities to give and receive our utmost in laying the foundation of education and training for our Corps, we trust in our pursuit of perfection to produce excellence. TAL
COL Blackwell is the Dean of The Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Notes
1. Chuck Carlson, Catching Excellence: The History of the Green Bay Packers in Eleven Games 25 (2022) (quoting Vince Lombardi at his first team meeting as Packers coach).
2. See generally U.S. Dep’t of Army, Doctrine Pub. 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession (31 July 2019) (C1, 25 Nov. 2019) (describing, inter alia, how striving for excellence calibrates our standards and efforts for discipline, stewardship, esprit de corps, and ethical conduct).
3. See id. para. 1-40.
4. Fred L. Borch, The Judge Advocate General’s School at Fort Myer, Army Law., Feb. 2017, at 1, 1.
5. Id.
6. Id. at 2-3.
7. In July 2003, The JAG School also became home to The Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and was renamed The Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School. The Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center, The Judge Advoc. Gen.’s Legal Ctr. & Sch., https://tjaglcspublic2.army.mil/center (last visited Apr. 3, 2024). The Legal Center serves as the JAG Corps’s “strategic resource”; its mission is “to support [The Judge Advocate General’s (TJAG)] strategic planning, and to assist TJAG in ensuring that lessons learned from military operations are integrated in the development of legal force structure, doctrine, and training strategies to optimize legal support to current and future operations.” Id.
8. See Fred L. Borch, From Advanced Course to Career Course to Advanced Course (Again) to Graduate Course: A Short History of Advanced Military Legal Education in the Corps, Army Law., June 2014, at 1.
9. See generally Fred L. Borch III, JAG Department to JAG Corps: Why Did It Happen?, Army Law., no 1., 2023, at 31 (describing the Army’s dramatic need for expanded legal services following World War II); U.S. Dep’t of Army, Field Manual 3-84, Legal Support to Operations (1 Sept. 2023) (providing an in-depth review of current Judge Advocate General’s Corps roles and responsibilities).
10. See The Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School, https://tjaglcs.army.mil/home (last visited Apr. 3, 2024).
11. Porter B. Williamson, I Remember General Patton’s Principles 104 (1979) (attributing the common saying to Benjamin Franklin); accord Kevin Ashby, Defuse Volatile Rumors with Facts, Sun Advocate, Feb. 21, 1995, at B13 (“Over a century earlier, Benjamin Franklin told us that if ‘everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking.’”).
12. See supra note 7.