Mission Creep in Military Lawyering (Divided Loyalties: Professional Standards and Military Duty‪)‬

I. INTRODUCTION When we study military lawyers as legal professionals we may be seeing too much of what they used to do--run a specialized criminal justice system--and not enough of what they do now: everything required to keep war-fighting legal. Prosecuting courts-martial and defending servicemembers accused of crime is a small part of the docket for twenty-first century judge advocates. (1) They also staff the military commission system--minted in 2001 and draining experienced litigators from other missions ever since--and provide legal assistance to servicemembers, but even those important tasks consume only a small fraction of military legal resources. (2) Most of military lawyering involves advising commanders on the legal dimensions of operations, sometimes termed "operational law." (3) And there is far more military lawyering than there used to be. Even in a period of military drawdown, the pace of growth in the legalization of military operations is likely to sustain an increasing corps of judge advocates. (4)