The Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps mission statement requires Judge Advocate Legal Services (JALS) personnel to operate “in support of a ready, globally responsive, and regionally engaged Army.”

News & Notes 2025 Issue 1

On a sunny May afternoon in 1960, Governor Bert T. Combs stood on the grounds of Fort Knox, dedicating a new grave marker for Abraham Lincoln’s grandmother, Bathsheba Lincoln.

The following members of our Regiment, in alphabetical order, passed away in 2024.

Keith Nightingale’s Phoenix Rising is a compelling account of the planning, training, and execution of Operation Eagle Claw. As the deputy operations officer of the Joint Task Force (JTF), Nightingale provides a first-hand account of the operation through personal journal entries.

The U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps has more than 9,700 active duty, Reserve, National Guard, and civilian attorneys, legal administrators, and paralegals.

The second half of my thirty-nine-year military career was divided between, on one hand, serving as the legal advisor to colonel-, brigadier general-, and major general-level commanders and, on the other, consuming legal advice as a brigadier general- and major general-level commander. 

The U.S. Army’s primary mission is to “organize, train, and equip its forces to conduct . . . land combat.”¹ However, no military Service can ignore the “interconnectedness of sea and land.”² A majority of people on earth live on land masses near or surrounded by water.³ Further, recent incidents involving cutting undersea cables, which impact communications on land, and ground-based attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea highlight the domain overlap.⁴

In 1944, shortly after the successful invasion of Western Europe, the Army had a capability gap that threatened to slow the advance of forces deeper into Europe and potentially weaken the D-Day momentum enjoyed by Allied forces.¹ Our Army could not rapidly transit tanks through hedgerows, pervasive throughout Eastern France, without either canalizing forces to road networks or exposing the vulnerable tank underbelly to enemy forces.²

Captain (CPT) Doe, an Army officer stationed in Germany, meets his friends one day after work and drinks several beers before returning home on his bicycle. Someone informed him that the German legal limit of intoxication while operating a bicycle is much higher than that for automobiles, and he believes he is well under this limit.¹ The U.S. military police stop him at a random sobriety checkpoint and measure his blood alcohol level, which is .10 grams of alcohol per 100 milliliters of blood. This is over the American military limit for drunk driving under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). Still, CPT Doe thinks nothing of the incident because he was operating a bicycle.