Commentary: Military justice reform compromise strikes fair balance between competing interests – By Brian L. Cox (Military Times) / December 13, 2021
With congressional leadership urging quick passage of the current House version of the National Defense Authorization Act with no further amendments, changes to the military justice system contained in the bill will likely become law. Although Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and other reform advocates have expressed severe dissatisfaction with the final outcome, the measures projected to be adopted by Congress represent a fair and practical compromise on a number of issues.
The most significant of these, of course, is authority to initiate (“prefer”) criminal charges for covered offenses and refer those offenses to court-martial. While Sen. Gillibrand continues to advocate for transferring this authority from commanders to military lawyers for most felony offenses, the change required in the NDAA is limited to “covered offenses” such as sexual assault, stalking, murder, and manslaughter.
Sen. Gillibrand has warned against this more limited scope of offenses, asserting that it would create “pink courts” that would “marginalize” female service members and make a “mockery of the entire criminal justice system.” Aside from the offensiveness of deliberately selecting gendered language to condemn a reform measure with which she disagrees, this inflammatory description by Sen. Gillibrand represents a fundamental mischaracterization of the military justice system.
