In February 2025, Pete Hegseth, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Defense, announced that he was firing the top lawyers for the U.S. Army, the Navy and the Air Force, much to the astonishment of Eugene R. Fidell, who served in the U.S. Coast Guard and co-founded the National Institute of Military Justice, a nonprofit organization.

Hegseth’s “purge” of senior level military lawyers alarmed many former judge advocate generals and was the catalyst for them banding together to sound the alarm that the normal legal guardrails within the Defense Department were being dismantled, Fidell says.

Fidell and others founded the Former JAGs Working Group. Since its formation in February 2025, the 30-plus member group has since issued statements, essays and briefs on military-related topics, including domestic deployments to assist with immigration crackdown efforts. According to its website, the group’s work uses legal principles that are “the same ones that guide real-world operational decision-making.”

“It’s actually very simple,” says Fidell, a senior research scholar in law at Yale Law School specializing in military law and of counsel at Feldesman, a Washington, D.C.-based law firm.

 “Our goal is to inform public opinion and decision-makers about where we are concerned about the rule of law within the military.”

According to him, there’s a “great deal of misinformation” being disseminated when it comes to issues like the rules regarding armed conflict, and the group contains expertise on a wide variety of military legal issues.

Some of the members are speaking publicly, while others prefer to remain anonymous. Fidell says the group discusses issues by electronic communications and Zoom, reaching a consensus before taking a public position.

“The group has no money, but it does show you that in American society, it doesn’t necessarily take a deep pocket to have some kind of impact,” Fidell says.

Since September 2025, the military has conducted a series of strikes against boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing people, on the premise that they were being operated by drug dealers, described as “narco-terrorists.”

The working group has issued several memos and offered expert advice on the attacks, stating their concern that the Pentagon is violating international law.

“The Former JAGs Working Group unanimously considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder or both,” according to one memo.

The boat campaign, says Margaret M. Donovan, a former military lawyer who advised commanders on the legality of airstrikes, has hurt the U.S. military’s credibility and resulted in a growing reluctance among allies to share information.

“It degrades the military and puts them and the U.S. in peril,” says Donovan, a lawyer in the Bridgeport, Connecticut, office of Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder and a member of the working group. “What are we doing here?”

The group has also expressed concern about the Pentagon’s recent investigation into U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, a Democrat from Arizona, after he participated in a November 2025 video that reminded military personnel that they can refuse unlawful orders. In January 2026, Hegseth censured Kelly, a retired Navy captain, who then filed a lawsuit against him.  

On Tuesday, federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C., failed to convince a grand jury to indict Kelly and five other Democratic lawmakers who posted a video reminding the military that they could refuse illegal orders, according to the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Also, the working group has warned about the potential use of armed forces against organizations that are labeled as “domestic terrorism” threats or assigning them to polling places.

Retired Maj. Gen. Steven J. Lepper, former Air Force deputy judge advocate general, is one of the founders of the working group.

Lepper, who served for one year as the acting director of the ABA’s Rule of Law Initiative, emphasizes his concern over Hegseth’s comments in September 2025 after it was announced that the Department of Defense would be changing its name to the “Department of War.”

Hegseth said the focus would be on “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” He also said the military was “going to raise up warriors, not just defenders.”

“We are seeing what this warrior ethos means,” Lepper says.

Rachel E. VanLandingham is a professor at the Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, where she teaches criminal law, national security law and law of war. She served as a judge advocate general in the Air Force, where she was a senior legal adviser on the international law of armed conflict.

In January, JAG officers were sent to help the Minnesota U.S. attorney’s office, after federal prosecutors quit amid pressure to investigate the widow of Renee Good, a protester killed by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.

They were doing that instead of advising on the legality of military tactics, and VanLandingham says she’s concerned that military lawyers are being “used, abused and sidelined.” 

Military lawyers have also been tasked by the Trump administration with prosecuting crime in Memphis, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C., along with serving as temporary immigration judges.

The Pentagon recently released a statement, saying the Defense Department "is proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with our law enforcement and Department of Justice partners.”

JAGs “regularly provide crucial legal support nationwide and bring their unique skills and dedication of our America's service members supporting our interagency partners as they deliver justice, restore order and protect the American people,” the Pentagon statement said.

The working group has also spoken out against the reassignment of military lawyers to serve as immigration judges.

Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, military lawyers acting as immigration judges can be sanctioned if they disobey orders, affecting their judicial independence, according to the working group.

Civilian immigration judges “may walk away from their jobs if they feel their independence has been compromised or if they are unwilling, unable or unqualified to perform them,” according to the group. “Judge advocates will not have that option.”