Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel. Credit: DoD photo by Glenn Fawcett

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Aug 15 2013 (IPS)

The U.S. secretary of defence has unveiled a series of new directives aimed at cracking down on an epidemic of sexual assaults in the armed forces, an issue that has seized the very top levels of the military brass in recent months.

According to the Pentagon’s most recent estimates, some 26,000 sexual assaults took place within the military ranks last year. That number represented a 35-percent increase over similar estimates for 2010, and fuelled a growing sense of outrage that some say could result in legislative action in coming months.“Small-scale military sexual assault solutions will not stem the cultural tide created by years of victim-blaming and retaliation." -- Former Marine Corps captain Anu Bhagwati

On Thursday, Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel described the elimination of sexual assault among the armed forces as one of his agency’s “top priorities”, requiring “absolute and sustained commitment”.

Building on a series of actions announced in May, Hagel has now ordered the Defence Department to create a victim’s advocacy programme. Critically, such units would ensure that those alleging assault are given their own legally trained representation, long a key demand by some lawmakers and advocates.

The directives will also move oversight for investigations up the chain of command and outside of victims’ own military units, strengthen prohibitions on “inappropriate relations” involving trainers or recruiters, and allow for those accused of assault (rather than victims) to be reassigned to other units.

The announcement received immediate response, despite the fact that both Congress and the president are currently out of Washington on summer breaks. While most lauded the actions as moving in the right direction, there was broad agreement that they did not go far enough.

“The initiatives announced today are substantial, but only a step along a path toward eliminating this crime from our military ranks,” a White House press secretary said Thursday on behalf of President Barack Obama, who in May sharply directed the Defence Department to take extraordinary steps to curb military sexual abuse.

“The president expects this level of effort to be sustained not only in the coming weeks and months, but as far into the future as necessary.”

Advocates reacted even more strongly, referring to most of the new mandates as mere tweaks.

“Small-scale military sexual assault solutions will not stem the cultural tide created by years of victim-blaming and retaliation,” Anu Bhagwati, a former Marine Corps captain and currently executive director of the Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN), an advocacy group, told IPS in a statement.

“The solutions announced today demonstrate that the U.S. Department of Defence is still only wading in the shallow end on these issues, unable to create the deeper, large-scale solutions our service members and veterans need.”

Chilling effect

At issue for many is a decision that Defence Secretary Hagel, who took over his current position in February, has already indicated he would not willingly take: moving the responsibility for investigating and prosecuting sexual assaults outside of the military command structure altogether.

“The [Defence Department] order falls short of reform that would protect victims from the outset – by keeping the decision to prosecute within the chain of command,” Taryn Meeks, a former U.S. Navy lawyer and now executive director of Protect Our Defenders, an advocacy group, said Thursday in response.

“Prosecutors – and not commanders – must be given the authority to decide whether to proceed to trial … The new policies leave commanders, who are not legal experts, and may have inherent biases and conflicts of interest, with the authority to decide whether to go to trial, pick juries and reduce sentences. This is not a solution.”

While several pieces of legislation are currently pending in the U.S. Congress to address various parts of the assault crisis, just one would take the step of requiring completely independent prosecution.

The sponsor of that bill, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, stated Thursday that the Pentagon’s actions were “positive steps” but not the “leap forward” required.

“As we have heard over and over again from the victims, and the top military leadership themselves, there is a lack of trust in the system that has a chilling effect on reporting,” she said.

“Three hundred and two prosecutions out of an estimated 26,000 cases just isn’t good enough under any metric. It is time for Congress to seize the opportunity.”

According to Protect Our Defenders’ Meeks, 46 senators have publicly supported Gillibrand’s amendment.

“[W]e are very close to this fundamental reform of the system,” Meeks says. “We are at a historic moment and we hope that all lawmakers will see this as the tipping point.”

Restoring trust

For years, critics have lambasted the military for allowing commanding officers the final say in assault cases. Indeed, the current flurry of action on this issue was in large part sparked off by a sexual assault case in which a commanding officer overturned a guilty verdict.

More broadly, such an environment has been widely seen as coercive, resulting in toxic situations for those who file cases and, as Gillibrand notes, intimidating countless other victims into silence.

Of those who did report an assault last year, nearly two-thirds said they experienced retaliation, according to an official report. A quarter of military assault victims identified their offender as within their chain of command, the report found, while half of victims said they decided not to report the attack because they believed there would be no response.

On Thursday, Pentagon officials admitted that the new measures were necessary in order to restore the trust of service members.

“Frankly, we want increased unrestricted reporting and we can only get that if we can work with the trust of the victim,” Lieutenant General Curtis Scaparrotti, director of the Joint Staff, told reporters.

Yet he also noted that his office has been and will continue working “very closely” with Senator Gillibrand and other lawmakers, and suggested that additional changes could be on the horizon.

“We believe there’s merit in many of the legislative issues,” Scaparrotti said. “So we’re going to look at this and, frankly, if we believe we can make a difference in this problem set, we’ll look strongly at enacting other initiatives that perhaps aren’t in this group here today.”

Members of Congress, meanwhile, are clear that they will continue legislative pushes regardless of Pentagon actions.

“Today’s announcement has little bearing on the fact that Congress will soon mandate a host of historic reforms,” Senator Claire McCaskill, the sponsor of currently pending legislation on military assault, told IPS in a statement, “but it’s evidence that the Defence Department is now treating this problem with the seriousness that we expect, and that survivors deserve.”

U.S. President Barack Obama with the Navy's F/A-18 Green Hornet. Credit: Official U.S. Navy Imagery/ CC by 2.0

By Lucy Westcott
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 5 2013 (IPS)

The United States military, an organisation that consumes 90 percent of the country’s federal oil allowance, is trying to become a greener institution.

The U.S. Navy has said that by 2016 it will run one of its 11 carrier strike groups using biofuel. In a test run of the new approach in the Pacific Ocean, a novel mixture of jet fuel, algae and cooking grease powered FA-18 Super Hornets, a type of fighter aircraft.

Within a decade, half of the Air Force and Navy’s fuel needs will be met by alternative energy sources, according to Christopher Merrill, director of the International Writer’s Program at the University of Iowa.

Merrill, who penned an essay for Orion Magazine titled ‘The Future of War‘, suggested that with climate change posing an increasing threat to U.S. national security, another name for this pioneering strike group could be the Great Green Fleet."I view this as somebody trying to...figure out what (we) are going to have to do to defend the country."
-- Christopher Merrill

The military also believes that the threat of climate change to U.S. security is not simply a temporary trend, Merrill said.

“I don’t view this as a one-off thing, I view this as somebody trying to look into the future, trying to figure out what (we) are going to have to do to defend the country,” Merrill said.

Climate change and security

In 2010, the Department of Defence recognised in its Quadrennial Defence Review (QDR) that climate change and energy will both play “significant roles in the future security environment”.

The military’s look towards a more sustainable future was confirmed by a report released by the Executive Office of the President last month, which affirmed U.S. President Barack Obama’s commitment to lower U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent of 2005 levels by 2020.

The report rendered the effect of climate disasters difficult to ignore: last year was the second most expensive year on record for the United States, with 11 weather-related natural disasters costing over 110 billion dollars in damages.

Marcus King, associate research professor of international affairs at the George Washington University, believes that threats from climate change would affect not only the United States through phenomena such as sea-level rise and droughts but the rest of the world as well.

The United States ought to be concerned that other nations, including U.S. allies, “could be constrained because they don’t have (the) adaptive capacity (to deal with climate change),” King told IPS.

Some, such as journalist Thomas Friedman, believe that issues around food security in Syria were the catalyst for the uprising there that began two years ago. And as climate change causes more humanitarian crises, the U.S. Navy will continue to assist in disaster relief and recovery, King pointed out.

“Once you look at global climate change as a threat, Africa has the least resistance…(and) it’s of strategic importance to the U.S.,” King said.

The Department of Defence recognised the potential increase in the Navy’s response to disasters abroad, reporting in the QDR that climate change is one factor “whose complex interplay may spark or exacerbate future conflicts”, along with cultural tensions and new strains of diseases.

Good PR?

But Leah Bolger, formerly with the U.S. Navy and now a peace activist, believes the green move to be more a publicity stunt than a progressive statement signalling changing times.

“I spent my (twenty) years in the military ambivalent about what the military policies were in foreign policy. It was a job…I didn’t really question my part in the military machine,” Bolger told IPS.

Now, however, Bolger called the Navy’s decision to make one carrier strike group green by 2016 “laughable”.

“(The green move is) like a page out of a PR book – something they can put out in their public affairs office to say, ‘We’re so mindful of the environment,'” Bolger said.

Still, one additional advantage of the green move is that the potential demand for alternative fuels could create a new market, Merrill told IPS. Already tax credits are being granted to wind farms, according to him.

“Once that market gets established, it’s likely that you’ll see the kind of innovations that came in the wake of the invention of the Internet,” he predicted.

Nevertheless, a change in the military’s energy consumption doesn’t necessarily mean a change in the behaviour of Americans, who consumed 19 percent of the world’s total energy resources in 2010, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, despite comprising around five percent of the global population.

Even if Americans knew about the Great Green Fleet, Bolger said, it wouldn’t do much to change their habits.

While the Great Green Fleet doesn’t necessarily improve the operational abilities of the Navy, the impetus is noble, King said. “If they have the ability to create demand (for alternative fuels)… I think that’s great, as long as it’s consistent with national security, which it is.”

U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. Credit: DoD Photo By Glenn Fawcett

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Apr 9 2013 (IPS)

The new U.S. secretary of defence, Chuck Hagel, pushed Monday for reforms of the armed forces’ judicial code that would roll back an archaic provision allowing high-ranking commanders to overturn military court verdicts, a move that would particularly impact on cases involving sexual assaults.

The move comes in direct response to a major recent scandal. Last month, a three-star lieutenant-general overturned the November conviction of a lieutenant-colonel for aggravated sexual assault involving a civilian employee at a NATO air base in Italy.There are thousands of victims in the department, male and female, whose lives and careers have been upended, and that is unacceptable.

The general, Craig Franklin, had not participated in the trial and gave no explanation for his decision to overturn the conviction and one-year sentence. Thereafter, the accused, Lieutenant-Colonel James Wilkerson, was reportedly released from prison and put back on active duty.

The case enraged Pentagon officials, politicians and the public alike, but effectively highlighted the decision’s legality under current military law. Not only does Article 60 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) allow high-ranking officers to lessen or eliminate punishment following court-martial decisions, but it also precludes the possibility of any appeal.

Though the Department of Defence says that guilty verdicts are overturned in only around one percent of cases, sentences are reportedly modified far more often.

Shortly after he took over as secretary of defence, Hagel ordered an inquiry into the issue. On Monday, he announced that he would be forwarding proposed legislation to the U.S. Congress that would make two changes to Article 60.

“First, eliminating the discretion for a [commander] to change the findings of a court-martial, except for certain minor offenses,” Hagel explained, admitting that the proposal would not completely do away with these powers.

“Second, requiring the [commander] to explain in writing any changes made to court-martial sentences … to justify – in an open, transparent and recorded manner – any decision to modify a court-martial sentence.”

Hagel noted that the proposed changes have the “full support” of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the heads of each of the major arms of the U.S. military.

“This is the beginning of a long process to ensure that victims of military sexual assault – whether they are women or men – get justice,” Barbara Boxer, a senator from California, said following Hagel’s announcement. Several legislative proposals to tweak Article 60 are already underway.

While the new regulations, if passed by Congress, would affect all types of major infractions, both the timing and the content of Hagel’s remarks make clear that the focus is on a current spate of assaults within the armed forces. The U.S. military is in the midst of what has been widely described as a sexual assault epidemic, reeling from what was estimated in 2012 by top Pentagon officials to be some 19,000 cases per year.

Relatively few of those are actually reported. However, even of those that are reported, recent studies have found that less than 10 percent of the accused are actually held accountable.

“[I]t is clear the Department [of Defence] still has much more work to do to fully address the problem of sexual assault in the ranks – this crime is damaging this institution,” Hagel said Monday.

“There are thousands of victims in the department, male and female, whose lives and careers have been upended, and that is unacceptable. The current situation should offend every single service member and civilian.”

Systemic bias

The UCMJ was created around the same time as the founding of the United States, and part of the rationale for Article 60 was both to encourage plea bargains and to allow for an appeals process that otherwise did not exist. Yet a senior defence official here on Monday told reporters that “the world had changed”.

Indeed, while the U.S. system was originally based on the United Kingdom’s, the latter’s was changed in the mid-1990s after the European Court of Human Rights found it gave too much power to top commanders. Canada, Israel and New Zealand have reportedly made similar decisions.

Advocates and campaigners are applauding Hagel’s move. Yet many are also stepping up calls for the Pentagon to make more substantive changes, particularly to deal with what some have called systemic bias within the military against victims of sexual assault.

“Defence Secretary Hagel’s move toward disallowing generals to overturn convictions within the military is a step in the right direction, but only one step,” Helen Benedict, a journalism professor at Columbia University and the author of “The Lonely Soldier”, on the experiences of U.S. women soldiers in Iraq, told IPS.

“He still needs to end the inherent conflict of interest built into the military criminal justice system by taking the decisions to investigate and prosecute those accused of sexual assault out of military hands altogether.”

A group working on the issue of military rape, the Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN), commended the proposed changes, noting the proposal is encouraging in the aftermath of the “travesty of justice” surrounding the Wilkerson case.

“However, post-trial review is only one component of the command-driven system that currently governs how military crimes are handled,” Anu Bhagwati, SWAN executive director and a former Marine Corps captain, said in a statement sent to IPS.

“Unless pre-trial decision-making around investigation and prosecution of offenses is also removed from the hands of commanders and given to impartial prosecutors, military criminal justice will remain a lesser form of justice, both for victims and defendants.”

Hagel appears to be aware that additional reform measures will be necessary, noting Monday that he will soon announce new actions to strengthen the Pentagon’s “prevention and response efforts”.

He also unveiled the formation of several new independent panels that will be tasked with reviewing “the systems used to investigate, prosecute and adjudicate crimes involving sexual assault, and judicial proceedings of sexual assault cases.”