Military Justice chapter

Just finished a draft of a handbook chapter on military justice, cowritten with my colleague Meredith Kleykamp. At the end of the piece, we look ahead to cyber security and the issues this raises for national militaries. For the United States, the lack of political will to cede sovereignty to international organizations and transnational regulation seems to me likely to cause huge problems in dealing with cyber issues, since the military is so ill-equipped in its institutional culture to deal with these issues. Here again we see big pressures to offload risk to civilian contractors, who in this case are also enormously advantaged in terms of ability. One version of the future military will be an integrated team of legal experts and strategic communications experts advising commanders on what sorts of risks are acceptable in a given scenario, and an integrated team of cyber specialists working in tandem with (or in place of) operatives on the ground to bend their opponents. Another version would be a team of shooters sent in after the cyber people have done their work. In other words, political risk (measured in law and optics, nationally and globally) will have to supplement the use of force, both actual and virtual. Whether military organizations want to follow the long path to gaining those competencies or will choose to offload them to other agencies (public or private) remains to be seen.