This month alone, the Justice Department requested about 40 lawyers, a U.S. official told Defense One.

"As special assistant United States attorneys in Minneapolis, department JAGs will provide crucial legal support in Minnesota, and help our interagency partners as they deliver justice, restore order, and protect the American people," Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said in a Jan. 16 news release.

Wilson gave no numbers, but her press release followed the Jan. 7 announcement that 20 JAGs were being assigned to prosecute violent crime in Memphis, Tennessee, where federal agents and National Guard troops have been patrolling and making arrests since September, when President Trump ordered a surge.

Similar orders have sent 20 other JAGs to federal prosecutors’ officers in Washington, D.C., where National Guard troops continue their patrols.

There is precedent for military lawyers to help prosecute civilians, but not at this scale nor in these types of roles, experts said.

“The government has used JAGs to help prosecute offenses unrelated to military bases in a handful of cases over the years, but we've never seen JAGs used at this scale in civilian criminal cases with no military connection,” said Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor. “Not only does the scale raise serious concerns about taking JAGs away from their regular duties, but it also raises the question of why the Department of Justice is having so much trouble trying these cases itself.”

A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment on the exact number of JAGs assigned to serve as special assistant U.S. attorneys and the types of roles they are taking on.

“The Department of Justice is laser-focused on protecting the American people from violent crime and rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We have charged dozens of defendants from Minnesota who’ve defrauded the American people, and our whole-government approach to combatting these issues will continue until all fraudsters and violent criminals are brought to justice.”

DOJ policy once barred JAGs from serving as assistant U.S. attorneys outside military bases. 

“While the military interest in aiding the civil authorities in connection with these prosecutions might in some cases warrant the assignment of regular military officers to assist civilian prosecutors, the duties performed under such a detail could not be such as to require them to act as statutory or constitutional officers of the civil government,” read a 1983 memo from DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, adding that “regular JAG officers may no longer be authorized by this Department to perform the duties in question.”

Vladeck said Congress later changed existing laws to permit such assignments, and in 1986 the Uniform Code of Military Justice was altered to allow military lawyers to represent the U.S. government “in civil and criminal cases.” Further legal analysis from that same year also said the arrangement does not violate the Posse Comitatus Act, which outlaws the use of the military for federal law enforcement.

Some military legal experts disagree with that analysis. Steven Lepper, a retired Air Force judge advocate general, said he has serious doubts about the administration's new use of the military lawyers.

“That proposal is inconsistent with the typical way in which military lawyers have been used as special assistant U.S. attorneys in the past,” Lepper said. “The fact that there is no military nexus here between the kinds of cases that JAGs serving as special assistant U.S. attorneys are going to help prosecute essentially puts these JAGs in a role where the fundamental question ought to be whether doing that is a violation of Posse Comitatus.”

Lepper added that these lawyers are still subject to the UCMJ, making it harder for them to challenge certain actions. After the deaths of U.S. citizens in Minneapolis during immigration-related law enforcement operations, several federal prosecutors resigned from their roles. 

“It takes military lawyers who are less likely to say no, or for whom it becomes more difficult to say no, and puts them in a position where they essentially are being asked to follow orders that others wouldn’t,” Lepper said.

The moves are a burden on the judge advocate general corps, which is already overworked.

Eric Carpenter, a retired Army lawyer who is now an associate professor of law at Florida International University, said “there’s no fat to cut” in the JAG corps. He added that given how understaffed many JAG offices are, it’s unlikely that special assistant U.S. attorneys who’ve been working on cases tied to military bases would be reassigned to the new roles.

Carpenter also said those who get sent to U.S. cities for those roles are likely to face a steep learning curve.

“I think most of the people getting [mobilized] or tasked for this aren't going to have any federal prosecution experience,” Carpenter said. “So they're going to be just jumping in and trying to figure it out as they go.”

“My real cynical take is the strategy isn't worth the paper it's written on because the president’s going to do whatever he wants and he's not going to even try to adhere to it, which might be why it was released with such little fanfare,” said Stacie Pettyjohn, a CNAS senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security, which hosted a Wednesday discussion on the strategy.

And while there are always some tensions or contradictions in an NDS, because they’re written by a group of people, this latest document seems to go in several directions at the same time, said Becca Wasser, a CNAS adjunct senior fellow. 

New world order

The thesis of the NDS is that the rules-based international order, an American-led framework that promoted liberal democratic values and diplomacy as a means to prevent another world war, was a far-fetched fantasy. It’s a favored worldview of Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s policy chief and key NDS author.

The strategy proposes to replace that framework with what the Trump administration has coined the “Trump corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine: “American military dominance” in the Western Hemisphere that denies “adversaries’ ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities” there.

“What is interesting about that, though, is that, of course, it doesn't say much about what this is,” said Dustin Walker, policy director at Anduril. “What is replacing that order, what are the sort of higher-order strategic objectives that we are pursuing here?”

Experts have described the new NDS as a sharp departure from previous U.S. strategy, but the document itself is thin on details of how defense posture or priorities will shift to support it.

“You don't really have much of a description of how the size and shape of our military is going to change pursuant to these strategic priorities,” Walker said. “You don't really hear much about sort of procurement priorities. I think Golden Dome is literally the only specific capability area mentioned in the document. So you don't have a lot of guidance for force design and development here. There's no description of the budget or sort of investment profile that's going to be required to do this.”

China

The NDS says the U.S aims not to “strangle” or “humiliate” China, but instead to forge a detente that halts the growth of Chinese economic inroads in the Western Hemisphere and uses “dominance” to keep China in line, including by increasing defenses along the First Island Chain.

“And I think you see that a lot on the China front, which is sort of stripping away any of any discussion about, essentially any normative judgment about the competition between the United States and China, and simply saying that, on pure power terms, we will deny them their ability to assert interest in military force in the region,” Walker said.

And at the same time, even more than the National Security Strategy does, he added, it proposes diplomacy to ensure a “decent peace, on terms favorable to Americans but that China can also accept and live under,” in the NDS’s words.

But, Wasser said, “that isn't necessarily how China might perceive it as well… And so when you have that, plus the aim of bolstering posture along the First Island Chain, there's a lot of incongruencies.”

‘Marauder force’

The NDS also has a novel approach to simultaneity, the idea that the U.S. military might have to manage conflicts in multiple regions at once. Rather than talk about the capabilities needed to respond to, say, a Russian incursion into NATO territory while China invades Taiwan, the strategy downplays the possibility by suggesting that the U.S. will stay mostly in its own hemisphere, except when it wants to quickly put down conflicts in other regions.

“The strategy seems to be saying that they want to maintain the capacity for the United States to conduct these sort of sudden, short-notice, large, sharp strikes all over the world, essentially while erecting the First Island Chain-denial defense…to have a marauder capability, where, if the president has a problem with a particular country, a particular leader, a crisis emerges, whatever the case may be, we want to suddenly be able to shift a lot of forces to conduct high-tempo, short-duration operations,” Walker said.

It would be interesting to see how they work out the math on that, he added, without a significant change in force design or posture, just based on the Defense Department’s shuffling of forces to simultaneously home in on Venezuela while putting pressure on Iran to end its violent clashes with protestors.

“It's interesting. This document came as we were waiting for a carrier to depart the South China Sea, to get to the Persian Gulf, because we had taken one and moved it to the Caribbean,” Walker added.

And it will only get more difficult if, as the strategy seems to suggest, the “you’re on your own” message to allies means a withdrawal of permanently stationed U.S. troops around the globe, which will mean fewer access points from which to launch these strikes. 

“We're going to lose basing access, probably because less people are going to be willing to work with us when we're using force wantonly and at the president's discretion for these marauding raids, right?” Pettyjohn said. “And we're not consulting, necessarily, in the same way and treating alliances as enduring partnership. It's a much more transactional thing, which means we're going to need more access-insensitive forces, which means long-range bombers and tankers, or you need the Navy—the surface fleet is one of the most stressed forces right now in terms of readiness.”

‘$1.5-trillion budget’

While the NDS suggests that the U.S. wants to reduce its involvement around the world, it doesn’t intend to save any money while doing it. Earlier this month, Trump announced in a social media post that he’d like to see the defense budget increase by half, to $1.5 trillion.

Much of that will go to paying for Golden Dome, experts said, as that effort alone is estimated to cost around $1.1 trillion.

But it may also fund this self-sustaining precision strike force that the document hints at.

“Essentially, what this strategy almost sets up for me are two parallel force structures, right? Wasser said. “There's the force structure that we have, that's already budgeted for, that's already bought, that's already baked into the system, and that's optimized for the Indo-Pacific, and then there's this more flexible surge force…that sometimes is going to require a different set of capabilities.”

Economic-pressure campaigns like the one underway in Venezuela are going to require different assets than the ones the U.S. has been developing for combat against China. Those might be a tough sell to Congress, she added, based on how much recent defense authorizations and appropriations have focused on competition with China. 

“But I thought that there wasn't really the linking of the ways and means, other than making allies do more,” Pettyjohn said. “There was no sort of context or specificity about what the U.S. is going to do…and what our force looks like as a result of this.”

Eight Republicans joined all Democrats in defeating the measure, which the House previously approved with broad bipartisan support. It was set to coast to President Trump’s desk until Border Patrol agents fatally shot Alex Pretti on Jan. 24, leading to demands from Senate Democrats that more restrictions be placed on the Homeland Security Department’s immigration enforcement efforts as part of the agency’s funding bill. 

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., subsequently laid out his caucus’ demands for DHS reforms, including the removal of masks by DHS law enforcement personnel, mandated use of body cameras, a requirement for third-party warrants to enter homes, the end of roving patrols in metropolitan areas by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and more uniform restrictions on use of force by federal agents. Democrats have engaged the White House on those requests and are currently negotiating a path forward. 

Lawmakers in both parties have expressed an openness carving out DHS appropriations and passing the other five spending bills still outstanding. Such a package would fund the departments of Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, State and Treasury, as well as other related agencies. Under the plan, Congress would approve a stopgap continuing resolution for DHS to allow for negotiations to continue. 

That path would almost certainly lead to at least a short shutdown, however, as funding those agencies is set to expire first thing Saturday. Once an agreement clears the Senate, it would have to go back to the House, which is currently on recess until lawmakers return on Monday. 

If a deal getting signed into law appears imminent, the Office of Management and Budget could instruct agencies to delay shutdown procedures. OMB pursued such an approach in 2018 when funding briefly expired for agencies but it declared the impasse was merely a “short, technical lapse.” It advised employees to show up to work due to the imminence of a resolution, though the situation created widespread confusion across federal agencies. 

How quickly the House could approve the bill remains to be seen, as some conservative Republicans have suggested they would not vote for any agreement without certain concessions.  

While a deal had not yet been reached as of Thursday afternoon, Trump said he was hopeful one would soon emerge. 

“Hopefully, we won't have a shutdown,” Trump said. “We're working on that right now. I think we're getting close. The Democrats, I don't believe want to see it either. So we'll work in a very bipartisan way, I believe, not to have a shutdown."

Frank Konkel contributed to this report. 

The law, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, permits U.S. spy agencies to gather communications of foreigners located abroad without obtaining a court warrant. Critics argue that the collection method, which can inadvertently gather the communications of U.S. persons, effectively bypasses Fourth Amendment safeguards.

Though the law was reauthorized two years ago under then President Joe Biden, it is set to expire in April unless renewed again by Congress.

“What I’ve experienced in my career is that this provides the warfighter, the decision maker, [with] the ability to have critical insight into threats that enables decision making,” Lt. Gen. Josh Rudd told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He also said he knows the law has “saved lives here in the homeland.”

The statements are unsurprising from a nominee set to lead the nation’s premiere foreign eavesdropping and hacking agency. In his role, Rudd would also co-lead U.S. Cyber Command, the digital combatant command responsible for many of the Pentagon’s offensive cyber missions. 

702 gives agencies like NSA legal permission to order U.S. internet and telecom providers to hand over communications data on foreign targets for use in national security investigations. But the authority also permits the incidental collection of communications data on U.S. persons linked to those foreign targets.

Some lawmakers and civil liberties groups argue that a warrant should be mandated for searches of collected 702 data that include U.S. persons’ communications. A warrant for such queries has been historically opposed by law enforcement and intelligence officials, who argue they can slow down timely investigations. 

Such a mandate is “a topic that I need to look into and get a better understanding, to give you a more wholesome and complete answer on that one,” Rudd told Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a privacy hawk that backs a warrant measure for the law.

He added that he has “supreme confidence that the men and women of the NSA are committed to protecting civil liberties and privacy of American citizens.”

The spying power is legally limited to the collection of foreign intelligence located abroad. But some lawmakers argue that aggressive immigration enforcement and questions around the Trump administration’s Fourth Amendment interpretations could increase the risk that Americans’ communications are swept up and queried without sufficient safeguards.

“So the administration, a number of months ago, secretly decided that agents can break into homes without a judicial warrant. Basically, they said the Fourth Amendment doesn’t matter anymore,” Wyden said in the hearing, referring to an internal ICE memo reported last week that permits immigration officers to enter a home without a judicial warrant.

It’s not clear how Rudd’s views would run up against the reauthorization process for FISA 702 this spring. Notably, in written questions during her confirmation hearing, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said warrants “should generally be required before an agency undertakes a U.S. Person query of FISA Section 702 data, except in exigent circumstances, such as imminent threats to life or national security.”

Asked about election security, Rudd committed to using NSA resources to inform lawmakers about foreign risks to U.S. elections. 

“The electoral process is fundamental to our democratic values, and Americans writ large, and I’ve committed throughout my career to serve to defend and uphold those values,” he said. “Any foreign threat to the electoral process should be viewed as a national security concern.”

As the 2026 midterms approach, the Trump administration has closed or scaled down many agencies and offices that track election threats, including the ODNI’s Foreign Malign Influence Center and the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. The president has long been a skeptic of the intelligence community, especially due to its prior assessments that concluded Russia sought to help Trump win the 2016 election.

When he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month, Rudd told lawmakers that his experience working with cyber intelligence in the Indo-Pacific qualifies him to serve in the dual-hatted role.

As the number two leader of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Rudd has spent his career largely in special operations and joint command roles. Some former officials and China analysts view Rudd’s Indo-Pacific background as relevant to U.S. cyber operations involving Beijing.

NSA and Cyber Command have been without a permanent leader for months, after far-right activist Laura Loomer pushed for the firing of their previous head, Gen. Timothy Haugh, in April. Since then, Lt. Gen. William Hartman has led the agency in an acting capacity. 

Rudd, if confirmed, will also have to contend with declining morale inside the spy agency, as well as significant workforce cuts that were influenced by Trump 2.0 efforts to shed government bloat and spending waste.