More than 8% of women in the U.S. military were sexually assaulted in 2021, even as reporting rates actually dropped, numbers a Defense Department spokeswoman labeled “extremely disappointing” and “tragic” when they were released in 2022. On Friday, after a decade-long effort to change the way the military handles sexual assault, President Joe Biden gave final approval to the most significant changes to the Uniform Code of Military Justice since it was established in 1950.
Biden has “made clear that our one truly sacred obligation as a nation is to prepare and equip those we send into harm’s way, and to care for them and their families both while they are deployed and when they return home,” a White House statement said. “The reforms implemented through [Friday’s] executive order do just that.”
Biden’s executive order is part of a 2021 law passed through Congress on a bipartisan vote, with the support of top military leaders. None of that means the right-wing media won’t decide to attack him for supposedly trying to harm the military, of course. Maybe they’ll find a way to bring his son Hunter into it.
The revamped military legal system will now put decisions about whether to prosecute sexual assault, rape, and murder allegations in the hands of trained prosecutors rather than military commanders. Those commanders had—and used—the authority to block prosecutions and even to overturn convictions. Service members who’d been assaulted described having their accounts questioned and their careers disrupted.
Sasha Georgiades, a former Navy petty officer, told ABC News in 2020 that after she was assaulted, she tried to report the incident to a superior. “I told him who had done it and he says, ‘He’s a good sailor. Do you really want to ruin his career? I looked at my [him] and I was like, I guess not. I guess I don’t matter.” Former Army nurse Kayla Kight said that after she reported an assault and was transferred at her request, she was told by a supervisor to “stop playing the victim card,” given a bad evaluation, and repeatedly transferred. “I didn’t get a good solid chance at a career because I was always starting over,” she said.
For years, in the face of high sexual assault rates and low rates of reporting, top military officials insisted that they could fix it without changing the system. “Maybe we have a bigger problem than I imagined,” then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno said in 2013. But admitting there was a big problem didn’t mean accepting that serious change might be necessary.
Fast forward to 2021, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a former general, finally said it: “Clearly what we’ve been doing hasn’t been working.” Gen. Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had long opposed taking prosecution decisions away from commanders, admitted, “We’ve been at it for years, and we haven’t effectively moved the needle.”
With military leaders accepting that it was necessary to change the military legal system to have a hope of fighting sexual assault—though still rejecting the full set of changes advocates were pressing for—Congress passed a compromise bill. Although it remains a compromise, this represents historic change. That 2021 law gave the Defense Department two years to set up the new Office of Special Trial Counsel to handle these cases. Biden’s executive order finalizing changes to the Uniform Code of Military Justice was due in December 2023, but he got there early.
This doesn’t mean the military won’t have a sexual assault problem next year, or two years after that. Change will remain slow. But Biden has done what he can to jump-start it.
