Military Law Essay

Lawyers are trained to specialize in certain fields, just as a soldier is trained to do a specific job for the military. Lawyers that specialize in military law spend countless years studying situations and assessing the ethicality of decision that soldiers have the choices to make. All of this studying allows the lawyers to have some insight into the world of a soldier, but they can still not grasp the entire concept. As stated by Sergeant Moss of the United States Marine Corps, “politicians cannot truly understand the lives of a soldier or the decisions they make until they too have seen bloodshed and tears from battle right in front of their eyes. Legally they have all the power to judge us, but they should never have the right to judge what they don’t understand” (Moss). When soldiers disobey the orders given to them, they face the possibility of being put on trial for their actions and the government may choose to incarcerate them. Even when their superior may agree with what the soldier did and how everything played out in the mission, the government may choose to charge the soldier with a crime. This may affect to what extent the soldier may disobey orders because the direct superior of the …show more content…
The men who trained the soldier get chastised by their superiors, making the soldier feel stressed in high pressure situations because they do not know at the time what decision will have the most backlash. After all of their training, they must realize that everything affects the position they are in. It will be ethical to shoot a woman in the middle of a city if she has a pistol on her body, and it is a total war such as WWII. Yet, if she hadn’t been carrying the pistol, this decision would not be ethical. If total war had not been declared on the nation the woman resided in, a soldier would be put on trial for these