100 Years of the JAG Corps

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  • By Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Bowne
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Disclaimer: This is a fictional article written as part of a writing contest.

 
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100 Years of the United States Air Force Judge Advocate General’s Corps:
A Retrospective on the Last Quarter Century

As we celebrate our heritage on this centennial of the first supra-global law firm, we continue to look to the future. Readiness for the next century requires preparation not for the inevitable, but for the possible.
This fictional article on the history of the JAG Corps from 2024 to 2049 is not a prediction, but a projection of what events, discoveries, technologies, and cultural trends may shape the future of our organization, practice, and role in the Air Force. Footnotes are provided to contextualize current events and reference trends, concepts, and emerging technologies of today that appear set to disrupt society and what it means to engage in the most consequential legal practice in the world (and beyond).
 
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Reflection

As the JAG Corps prepares to celebrate its centennial anniversary, it is appropriate to look back at the events that shaped its history over the past 25 years. These years represent a tectonic shift not only to the JAG Corps, but to the practice of law. We were called to transform our organization and how we execute our mission, and we did so by transforming the people in the system.[1]

In those years, the Air Force has weathered the many storms, literally and metaphorically, that have tested our ability to adapt and overcome.[2] The first storm occurred when the Blended Retirement System, a growing economy, generational shift,[3] and ability to work from anywhere[4] outside of the military resulted in a retention crisis across the DoD. Most career fields where able to temporarily stave off manpower shortfalls with bonuses. But money was not the problem, nor would it be the solution. The JAG Corps confronted the emerging crisis through introspection about how it can better attract and retain its talented judge advocates and paralegals, as well as inspire the Corps to thrive in this new environment. Collectively, the JAG Corps took a radical step by denouncing Command and Control as a leadership model. In its place, a new leadership paradigm of Trust and Inspire emerged.[5] The fundamental changes the JAG Corps made in the early ‘20s to our leadership and management paradigm put us on course to attract and retain inspired legal professionals.

Faced with unprecedented change, and choices, the JAG Corps led with courage and humility to adapt and thrive in ambiguity by creating a high-trust culture that collaborates and innovates to stay relevant.[6] Creating this environment was possible by recognizing what has worked before will not work in the future. The JAG Corps pioneered an organizational transformation that valued effectiveness over efficiency; of managing systems and leadership as a choice, not a position; innovation over compliance; and helping people reach their goals and potential.[7]

In these past 25 years, the JAG Corps’ legal practice has changed significantly. While few judge advocates today have experience litigating courts-martial, military justice was perhaps the most significant legal domain in the JAG Corps at one point. The increasing number of sensors connected to the internet and more obtrusive terms of service consumers willingly consented to watch short videos eroded any reasonable expectation of privacy.[8] The companies that profited most from collecting and selling personal data were able to effectively lobby to prevent any infringement of their rights to collect and use all video, audio, and biometric data in any way. Accordingly, every crime (indeed, every act) in the physical or digital domain was recorded by an array of sensors. The sensor-to-cloud pipeline allows on device prediction and warning of imminent crimes through pattern recognition in physiological and behavioral activity, preventing and ultimately deterring many offenses.[9] This reduced the number of contested courts-martial by 95 percent from 2030 to 2040.

The reduction of UCMJ violations and even fewer without reliable evidence available immediately led to a refocus on the JAG Corps’ support of military operations. Since the last manned aircraft landed in 2039, autonomous systems require careful planning, designing, and developing to adhere to myriad legal regimes. Intellectual property, contracting, domestic, international, and space laws are interrelated and dominate the legal practice. The Civil Law and Litigation and Operations and International Law Directorates combined in 2028, forming the National Security Law Directorate, with competency across disciplines required to develop and deploy new capabilities rapidly. By 2033, the new directorate became the Allied Security Directorate, as the NATO and AUKUS alliances expanded in scale and importance, and fully integrated combined forces became necessary.

As autonomous systems were fielded and replaced human-in-the-cockpit, and eventually human-in-the-loop aircraft, judge advocates began to be sought after members of the design, development, and deployment teams of AI systems. As the principal role of humans in combat became the responsible supervision and control of AI systems, judge advocates slowly transitioned from advisors to controllers—closing the gap between legal advice and action. The unique capabilities of the JAG Corps to navigate ethics, international law, domestic law, intellectual property law and contract law, combined with sound judgment, critical thinking, ability to interpret meaning from noise, and communication skills make judge advocates and paralegals vital to modern combat and deterrence.[10] Data science has been a core competency for over 20 years,[11] and STEM conversancy is instituted at an early age, so JAG Corps members possess robust technological understanding, though it is the JAG Corps’ growth mindset, transformational culture, and multidisciplinary collaboration that allows us to operate in the flexible, distributed manner required in a constantly disrupted environment.

The rapid changes that characterized the past 25 years required the JAG Corps to assess training. By 2023, human knowledge doubled every twelve hours.[12] There was a term that used to describe people, “know-it-all,” that fell out of parlance due to the impossibility of being an “expert” in any meaningful way.[13] The JAG Corps pivoted from just-in-time training to an organizational growth mindset. One might say the Corps became obsessed with continuous learning and development.[14] The Chief Learning Office followed shortly after the establishment of the Chief Innovation Office and Director of Diversity and Inclusion, naturally, as innovation requires the promotion of thinking differently, cultivating a sense of belonging, and knowledge sharing across the enterprise in real time.[15] Though we have come to expect continuous learning opportunities, it was not until 2022 that the Air Force offered free massive open online courses (MOOC) on data, AI, business, and leadership.[16] These opportunities evolved into learning through gamification and virtual reality to place judge advocates and paralegals in realistic environments that simulate advising a client, providing feedback, examining a witness, giving a closing argument, or assessing targeting packages.

As we celebrate our heritage on this centennial of the first supra-global law firm, we continue to look to the future. Readiness for the next century requires preparation not for the inevitable, but for the possible. While the technology we use and even our relationship with technology has evolved, especially in the last 25 years, our investment in continuous learning, celebration of thought diversity, culture of trust, and refusal to accept that the status quo is good enough has been revolutionary to the legal practice. By investing in the nation’s greatest resource, our people, the JAG Corps is always ready to proactively innovate, rapidly adapt, and continue to provide expert legal services at the speed of relevance to the most technologically advanced military in history.


About the Author

 
Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Bowne

Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Bowne, USAF

(B.A., Pepperdine University, Malibu, California; J.D., The George Washington University, Washington, D.C.; LL.M., The Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School, Charlottesville, Virginia; Ph.D., Law and Artificial Intelligence, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia) is the Staff Judge Advocate, 48th Fighter Wing, Royal Air Force Lakenheath, United Kingdom.
Edited by: Major Allison K.W. Johnson (Editor-in-Chief), Major Victoria Smith, and Major Andrew H. Woodbury
Layout by: Thomasa Huffstutler
 

Endnotes

[1] Brandon Leshchinskiy & Andrew Bowne, Digital Transformation is a Cultural Problem, Not a Technological One, War on the Rocks (May 17, 2022), https://warontherocks.com/2022/05/digital-transformation-is-a-cultural-problem-not-a-technological-one/.
[2] Mark Nevitt, Climate Change and the Law of National Security Adaptation, Northwestern U. L. Rev. (online) (2023), available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4273292; Dep’t of Defense, Report on Effects of a Changing Climate to the Department of Defense (Jan. 2019) (finding by 2040, 76 percent of the DoD’s mission essential installations will be under risk of recurrent flooding from climate change).
[3] Colin Smith, A Looming Retention Crisis, The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) (July 16, 2019) https://www.cnas.org/publications/commentary/a-looming-retention-crisis (arguing that BRS, demanding work schedules, perceptions that private sector is more lucrative, evolving family dynamics and motivations in younger generations pose significant challenges to both mid- and long-term retention).
[4] In the early 2020s, virtual reality (VR) and simulated workplaces were in their infancy. As new parallel processing techniques and neuromorphic computing overcame the end of Moore’s Law, an explosion of VR environments occurred, enabling teams to meet from anywhere on Earth, appearing in the same environment. See James B. Aimone, Neural Algorithms and Computing Beyond Moore’s Law, Communications of the ACM, Apr. 2019, at 110 (explaining how neuromorphic computing and the pursuit of developing such architecture will lead to scalable computing technology and greater understanding of the human brain). It wasn’t until quantum entanglement was solved that such environments were practical for both terrestrial and lunar communication. See Andrew Steane, Quantum Computing, (1997) https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9708022 (explaining that quantum entanglement is the state where two systems are so strongly correlated that gaining information about one system will give immediate information about the other no matter how far apart these systems are, violating the rule saying that no information can be transmitted faster than the speed of light).
[5] Stephen M.R. Covey et al., Trust & Inspire (2022).
The concept of “trust and inspire” is a leadership model with a goal of empowering and inspiring people to make meaningful contributions by connecting people to purpose that inspires caring and belonging, creativity and excitement, and commitment to the organization. See id. at 2-10.
[6] See id. at 23.
[7] See id. at 15-27.
[8] Nat’l Intel. Council, Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World 59 (2021) (explaining current notions of privacy will evolve in a hyperconnected world with autocracies and corporations collecting data for manipulation).
[9] See Yiran Zhao et al., Affective Touch as Immediate and Passive Wearable Intervention, Proc. of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Tech. 1 (Dec. 2022) (using physiological data, such as heart rate variability for the assessment of autonomic responses to stress); Vijay Gadepally et al., Developing a Series of AI Challenges for the United States Department of the Air Force, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp? tp=&arnumber=9991948 (last visited Apr. 26, 2023) (describing how multimodal physiological data collected from a VR pilot simulation can assess competency and predict cognitive overload)[Access to this document requires a subscription]. The state of the art in wearable devices today promises to develop in unimaginable ways, possibly by recognizing scienter and predicting a criminal act. When aggregating other signals, such as location, persons in proximity, social media, browser history, alcohol consumption, and financial data, it is plausible that a model can predict with high levels of confidence when a crime may occur.
[10] See Gerald C. Kane et al., The Technology Fallacy 110 (2022).
[11] See Andrew Bowne & Ryan Holte, Acquiring Machine-Readable Data, The JAG Reporter (Nov. 9, 2022), https://www.jagreporter.af.mil/Post/Article-View-Post/Article/3216144/acquiring-machine-readable-data/; Andrew Bowne & Benjamin McMartin, Implementing Responsible AI: Proposed Framework for Data Licensing, Geo. Mason U. Sch. of Bus., White Paper Series No. 10, 4 (Apr. 29, 2022). These articles demonstrate the necessity of lawyers to develop technical competency in data science to ensure contracts provide the Air Force what it needs to execute its mission, particularly in AI systems.
[12] Covey, supra note 5, at 19.
[13] See id. at 19.
[14] See Kane et al., supra note 10, at 114-6.
[15] Knowledge sharing is critical to overcoming manpower constraints. As hundreds of small offices, the JAG Corps is as knowledgeable as those currently assigned to that office. As an integrated and connected Corps, the JAG Corps can leverage the incredible talent of the entire Corps. Collaboration tools like Slack, Zoom, and cloud-based data storage have had a profound effect on the speed information travels. This trend looks likely to continue. With VR becoming more mature, phone calls can transform into what would appear to be in- person conversations, with the parties physically located on different continents.
[16] Adam Zewe, Program Teaches US Air Force Personnel the Fundamentals of AI, MIT News (Jan. 11, 2023) https://news.mit.edu/2023/ai-training-program-us-air-force-0111. Many continuous learning opportunities are available to Airmen through Defense University, or open source hosted by many technology companies.
 
Disclaimer: This is a fictional article written as part of a writing contest.