The Pentagon’s Lawyers Are Now Under Review

One of Pete Hegseth’s first actions after taking charge at the Pentagon was to fire top lawyers in the Army, Navy, and Air Force—senior officers who the defense secretary said functioned as “roadblocks” to the president’s orders. The former National Guardsman has a history of hostility toward military lawyers and the legal restraints they impose on the use of military might. They are known as judge advocates general. Hegseth calls them “jagoffs.”

This week, Hegseth proposed a “ruthless” overhaul of how the military’s thousands of lawyers in uniform, and their civilian counterparts, are organized, part of his campaign to move from, as he has called it, “tepid legality” to “maximum lethality.” JAGs serve a vital oversight function on issues such as whether drone strikes are aimed at legally justified targets and whether to prosecute adultery. “In some circumstances, the delivery of legal services across the Military Departments has become marked by duplication of effort, ambiguous lines of responsibility, uncertain reporting relationships, and inefficient allocation of legal resources that do not match the command’s priorities,” Hegseth said in a memo, which we reviewed, that announced the plans. He gave the military services 45 days to submit proposed changes to the way that they allocate legal responsibilities to their JAGs and civilian lawyers.

Hegseth couched the review in terms of efficiency and reducing waste and overlap. He said in a video released on the Department of Defense’s X account that JAGs in the future will be responsible for operational and military issues, including the laws of war and matters of criminal justice, and that civilian lawyers will handle more administrative work such as environmental and labor reviews and routine procurement.

But his plans have alarmed many current and former military lawyers, who see the bureaucratic justifications as cover for what they suspect Hegseth really wants to do: reduce the ranks of lawyers, purge internal dissent, and eliminate guardrails designed to restrict the military from carrying out legally dubious orders.

That anxiety would appear to be well placed. “The people who express alarm over this policy are either people who are unfamiliar with the problem, or who are part of the problem themselves,” Tim Parlatore, a Hegseth adviser, told us. He said that the effort would increase JAGs’ effectiveness by allowing them to focus on providing advice to commanders concerning operational matters.

Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesperson, said in a statement that the review is about freeing military lawyers from bureaucratic drag so they can focus on what matters: supporting commanders in combat to “ensure our forces remain lethal, disciplined, and ready to win.”

In his video, Hegseth says that in order to win wars like the one now being waged in Iran, “our warriors deserve legal teams as lethal and focused as they are,” though he does not elaborate on what a lethal legal team might look like. The memo we reviewed also suggests that Hegseth may fire or reassign military lawyers, instructing the services to propose ways to “best reduce redundancies.”

Military lawyers we spoke with don’t oppose the idea of changes to how JAGs are allocated across the armed forces or to how legal work is divided among them. But they are deeply suspicious of Hegseth’s intentions because of the secretary’s open disdain for their profession and because of some of his actions since he took office that many people view as stretching or breaking the law. These include the deployment of troops to American cities over the objections of local authorities, the campaign of lethal strikes on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean (including one incident in which a follow-up strike killed two survivors), and the launching of a war with Iran without constitutionally required congressional approval.

“We just have no faith that this is a good-faith thing,” one person familiar with the initiative told us; they, like others we interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation. Hegseth and his top advisers, the person said, are committed to “absolutely cutting JAGs out of key decisions.”

Hegseth’s antipathy for military lawyers stems from his view that they shackle rank-and-file soldiers. In his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, he recounts his outrage when, while he was a platoon leader in Iraq in 2005, a JAG informed his men that they couldn’t fire at a suspected insurgent holding a rocket-propelled grenade until the weapon was pointed at them with hostile intent, a legal justification for lethal use of force. Hegseth later told his soldiers to disregard that “bullshit rule” and to fire at anyone they perceived as a threat, he writes. “There are some good ones out there, but most spend more time prosecuting our troops than they do putting away bad guys,” Hegseth writes about military lawyers. “It’s easier to get promoted that way.”

As defense secretary (his statutory title; he prefers “secretary of war”), Hegseth has railed against “stupid rules of engagement” and has expanded commanders’ authority to conduct air strikes without higher-level approval. He has pushed the military into President Trump’s counter-narcotics campaign—terrain typically reserved for the Coast Guard and law enforcement—which has killed at least 157 people in boat strikes in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. Hegseth has celebrated the strikes and their lethality. The administration hasn’t provided evidence supporting its claims that the people it has killed were drug traffickers. (Even if they were, drug trafficking per se is not a capital crime in the United States.) Unlike the handful of defense secretaries (both acting and confirmed) during Trump’s first term, who often acted as a check on the president’s most disruptive impulses, Hegseth tends to be an accelerant, a role he relishes.

[Read: Pete Hegseth delights in violence]

Steven Lepper, a retired major general who served as the second-highest-ranking lawyer in the Air Force, told us that Hegseth is right to point to overlap among uniformed and civilian lawyers. But that approach is designed to provide different perspectives and therefore strengthen the quality of the advice, he said. “It’s difficult in that context to consider this a serious effort to streamline the delivery of legal services,” Lepper said. “Rather, in that context, one—including me—might infer that this is yet one more effort to marginalize the law and lawyers in DOD.”

JAGs from across the military services serve at combatant commands, in large units and with troops deployed overseas; the branches also have their own civilian attorneys, who add up to thousands of lawyers across the force. The Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel, staffed by civilians, advises Department of Defense leadership.

The ranks of JAGs have declined in the past year because of lawyers both being forced out and quitting, current and former JAGs told us. At the same time, Hegseth has authorized the reassignment of hundreds of JAGs for temporary duty as immigration judges.

Congressional staff told us that they have seen a spike in JAGs and other members of the military contacting lawmakers with concerns that the Pentagon’s leadership is targeting or sidelining JAGs. “The overarching sense here is that at every turn over the past year or so, the administration broadly has shown that if there is an opportunity to seize greater control and power over lawyers, whether it’s civilian or uniforms, they will take that as far as they possibly can,” one Democratic congressional official told us.

Hegseth’s suggestion that making the military more lethal is a lawyer’s job was particularly unnerving to many JAGs, who interpreted it as a signal to pay less regard to the international laws of war, such as those enshrined in the Geneva Convention, to which the U.S. is a party.

“If you’re advising on operational law, your goal as a lawyer is not to increase lethality. If that were the goal, then lawyers would just say, ‘Yes, bomb everything.’ But that would be a blatantly unethical goal for a lawyer,” Sarah Harrison, a former civilian Pentagon attorney, told us.

Those involved in planning Hegseth’s review told us that he believes that reform of the JAG system across the military will ultimately make service members safer. “As many people try to say, ‘Oh, he wants to just ignore the Geneva Convention, get rid of all rules.’ No,” one official told us. “Don’t put a whole bunch of extra rules on that don’t make sense, that serve no purpose other than to make our people less safe but make some JAG feel more comfortable.”

Some military lawyers pointed out that there are long-term risks to U.S. forces if leadership shows a disregard for the laws that govern behavior among the troops. The United States can’t expect its adversaries to uphold the laws of war, they noted, if it doesn’t do so itself.