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The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, is expected in the coming weeks to start a sweeping overhaul of the judge advocate general’s corps as part of an effort to make the US military less restricted by the laws of armed conflict, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The changes are poised to have implications across the military, as Hegseth’s office considers changes to the interpretation of the US rules of engagement on the battlefield to the way that charges are brought under the military justice system.
The defense department is currently in the process of nominating new judge advocate generals (Jags) for the army, navy and air force after Hegseth fired their predecessors in a late-night purge last month, and the overhaul is not expected to start until they are in place.
But remaking the Jag corps is a priority for Hegseth, who on Friday commissioned his personal lawyer and former naval officer Tim Parlatore as a navy commander to oversee the effort carrying the weight and authority of the defense secretary’s office.
The commission is as a reservist in the Jag corps and he will continue to run his private practice outside his military obligations. Parlatore previously defended Donald Trump for mishandling classified documents and former Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher on war crimes charges.
The overhaul of the Jag corps will be aimed at retraining military lawyers, the people said, so that they provide more expansive legal advice to commanders to pursue more aggressive tactics and take a more lenient approach in charging soldiers with battlefield crimes.
Part of that approach reflects Parlatore’s views on Jag officers, whom he has described to associates as effectively becoming involved in decision making and failing to exercise discretion when deciding what charges to include in military prosecutions.
One of the complaints has been that Jags have been too restrictive in interpreting rules of engagement and took the requirement that soldiers positively identify a target as an enemy combatant before opening fire to mean soldiers needed to identify the target having a weapon.
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The criticism of the Jag corps has come from both Hegseth and Parlatore, the people said. Hegseth has made reworking the rules of engagement a tenet of how he intends to lead the defense department and about the need to restore a “warrior ethos” to a US military leadership he sees as soft.
Some of those rules were a deliberate policy shift by the US military, after senior officers such as Gen David Petraeus came to believe that civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan were turning the local population against US forces and drawing support to the enemy.
But in his book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth derisively referred to the lawyers as “jagoffs” and expressed frustration with the laws of armed conflict as being too restrictive for frontline soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, which allowed the enemy to score battlefield victories.
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And in Trump’s first term, Hegseth privately and publicly as a host on Fox and Friends appealed to Trump to pardon US soldiers accused of committing war crimes, including Gallagher, who was accused of murdering a captive Islamic State fighter in Mosul.
Hegseth’s views as expressed in his book are shared by Parlatore, who saw the Gallagher case as an example of overzealous prosecution and suggested he could reform the Jag corps because he had experience as both a former officer and defense lawyer.
Parlatore made clear to the defense secretary’s office that he was not pushing for the US to not abide by the Geneva conventions and the uniform code of military justice even if the US’s enemies ignored them. But he intends to change how they are interpreted, the people said.
The legal positions of Jags has often been fraught, including in the George W Bush administration after the September 11 terrorist attacks, when Jags resisted the administration’s view that Bush could lawfully direct the military to ignore the Geneva conventions when handling detainees.
The Bush administration claimed it was taking the justice department’s legal interpretations and moved to cut out military lawyers from deliberations, and then tried to subordinate them to politically appointed civilian general counsels for their branches.
In 2004, Congress passed laws that made it illegal for anyone at the Pentagon to interfere with the ability of Jags to “give independent legal advice” to secretaries and chiefs of staffs for their branches. But it did not constrain a reform of the Jag corps from within.
