This article was published over two months ago, but Independence Day now affords us a proper opportunity to share it. We received MAJ Eric M. Liddick’s exceptional essay from one of our Captains in the field, along with the following thoughts authored by his supervisor as part of a “professional reading” series.
“This article was written by a fellow Judge Advocate: Major Eric Liddick. As he reflects upon his time as a legal advisor to a Special Operations Task Force, he discusses the role he played in determining whether people he never met would live or die. He was not the decision maker, the person pressing the launch button, nor the one squeezing the trigger. But his advice to his commander played a major role in determining whether those actions would occur.
Obviously, this article is most applicable to people advising commanders in a contingency operation. However, on a broader level it applies to you, too. Your advice as a legal advisor to an investigating officer, or as legal reviewer when assessing actions for legal sufficiency or preparing draft action memos, helps to shape command decisions. This, in turn, often has enormous impact on the lives of Soldiers whom you’ve never met—the subject, respondent, complainant, victim, family members, and others.”
No Legal Objection, Per Se
War on the Rocks
“This is a story about how a lawyer’s professional responsibilities, when tossed into the pressure cooker of combat, can produce unpalatable consequences; a story about the reaches of war and post-traumatic stress and moral injury on its less obvious participants; and how the hidden costs of war may be more expansive than we realize.”