Joint Chiefs on Legal Support to Military Operations
A newly updated doctrinal publication from the Joint Chiefs of Staff describes the infrastructure of legal review and support to all phases of military operations.
“It is DoD policy that members of the DoD components comply with the law of war during all armed conflicts, however such conflicts are characterized, and in all other military operations.”
“Legal advisors actively participate in the entire planning process from joint intelligence preparation of the operational environment […], to mission analysis, to course of action development and recommendation, through execution.” See “Legal Support to Military Operations” (pdf), Joint Publication 1-04, August 17, 2011.
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
The federal government can support more proactive, efficient, and cost-effective resiliency planning by certifying predictive models to validate and publicly indicate their quality.
We need a new agency that specializes in uncovering funding opportunities that were overlooked elsewhere. Judging from the history of scientific breakthroughs, the benefits could be quite substantial.
The cost of inaction is not merely economic; it is measured in preventable illness, deaths and diminished livelihoods.