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Judge Advocates in Combat: Army Lawyers in Military Operations from Vietnam to Haiti (review)
- The Journal of Military History
- Society for Military History
- Volume 67, Number 2, April 2003
- pp. 642-643
- 10.1353/jmh.2003.0138
- Review
- Additional Information
The Journal of Military History 67.2 (2003) 642-643
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Judge Advocates in Combat: Army Lawyers in Military Operations from Vietnam to Haiti. By Frederic L. Borch. Ft. McNair, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 2001. GPO S/N 008-029-00373-2. Maps. Photographs. Charts. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xix, 413. $40.00 from the Superintendent of Documents, PO Box 371954, Pittsburgh, PA 15250.
The Army employs more attorneys than any government agency other than the Department of Justice. It calls these lawyers judge advocates, and has roughly 1,500 on active duty and 2,800 in the reserves. Most judge advocates spend their time performing the staples of military legal work in the garrison. They provide legal assistance to soldiers and their families, participate in the occasional court-martial, handle claims for damaged property, and so forth. Yet, time and again in recent history, a select group of these attorneys have left their comfortable offices to join in military operations far from home.
Colonel Frederic L. Borch, himself a judge advocate, has written a narrative history of the role of Army attorneys in military operations from 1959 to 1996. These operations include U.S. actions in Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, and Haiti. Having gathered first-hand accounts from over a hundred participants in these operations, the author thoroughly documents who was there and what they did.
The book is not aimed specifically at lawyers. Col. Borch wisely eschews technical analysis of legal issues. He focuses instead on how individual army lawyers endeavored to perform their missions. We see them looking for evidence of war crimes among the dead and investigating security breaches in Vietnam, trying to distinguish combatants from noncombatants in Somalia, [End Page 642] and helping to impose order in Haiti. As with Stephen Ambrose's narrative military histories of World War II, this approach brings the historical periods described to life. Readers see the challenges real soldiers faced, and how they addressed them.
Military attorneys will find the book especially interesting because it contains detailed accounts of what today's senior judge advocates did while serving as junior officers in military operations. Reading about the hardships of Vietnam's jungles and the Middle East's deserts, they will recognize the names of young captains and majors who later became generals.
In the process of recounting this history, the book presents and supports a specific thesis. It shows that judge advocates over time gradually have assumed an important new duty in combat operations. In particular, when accompanying forces in the field, they have become heavily engaged in what the author calls "operational law." Judge advocates, for example, now directly influence the planning and execution of military actions by drafting rules of engagement, aiding in the selection of targets, crafting policies to ensure compliance with the law of war, and even by advising on political matters in host nations.
Col. Borch maintains that this new function of judge advocates has enhanced mission success by providing commanders with necessary guidance that they previously lacked. Untouched, however, is the difficult question whether judge advocates have made war fighting excessively legalistic, perhaps impeding military operations. Perhaps this issue is best left to the many non-lawyers in the military whom the judge advocates serve.
Gregory E. Maggs
George Washington University Law School
Washington, D.C.
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