National Affairs: Military Justice

• Share

As one more milestone on the road to unification, the armed forces established a system of equal justice for one & all. The Pentagon issued the first of 450,000 service manuals creating uniform disciplinary procedures for the Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard. The revised laws:

¶Put three new offenses on the books: "missing movement," i.e., missing the departure of a ship, aircraft or ground unit; "misconduct as a prisoner of war in the hands of the enemy"; "drunken or reckless driving."

¶ Gave every enlisted man the right to demand that one-third of his court-martial be fellow enlisted men. Army and Air Force men have had this privilege, but not the Navy or Marines.*

¶Reduced solitary confinement on bread & water (more or less hallowed custom dating back to earliest Navy days) from 30 days to a maximum of three days, and then only when the offender is actually "attached to or embarked in a vessel."

¶Kept as mementos of harsher days the Navy's stern warning against punishment by "flogging, branding, marking, tattooing on the body, or any other cruel or unusual punishment," and the Army's ban on punishment by "carrying a loaded knapsack, shaving the head, placarding, pillorying, placing in stocks, or tying up by the thumbs."

¶Reworded the charge against a fighting man's desertion under fire. In the old law it was directed against one who "pusillanimously cries for quarter"; in the new, it is one who "is guilty of cowardly conduct." The penalty, now as before: death.