Adapting on Command

By any measure, it was an exceptionally busy week.

On Aug. 9, Robert Borcherding ’99 was promoted to Army brigadier general and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to his new post as legal counsel to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He started his new job at the Pentagon on Aug. 13. The United States began its final withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan on Aug. 14, and Kabul fell to the Taliban just days after that. That left Borcherding little time to get up to speed.

“We quickly became consumed with all things Afghanistan,” he said.

The new legal counsel to the Joint Chiefs is nothing if not adaptable, and a quick study as well.

“My first few weeks were dominated by fairly complex interagency crisis management,” he said. “Since then, the pace has leveled off a bit, but it’s regularly punctuated by emerging national security issues.”

But perhaps the best way to describe what he does is to explain what his boss, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, does. The Joint Chiefs chairman is the principal military adviser to the president, the secretary of defense and the National Security Council, as well as the various U.S. military commands around the world. When the Joint Chiefs are called upon to make policy recommendations, one question that often arises, Borcherding said, is whether a certain course of action is legal. That often goes hand in hand with a second question: Even if something is legal, is it wise to pursue? 

Borcherding and his staff of 20 military lawyers attempt to provide the Joint Chiefs with answers to those questions. It is a unique feature of the American military that each of its 11 combatant commands also has a legal team, and Borcherding and his staff advise them, as well. That’s a lot of clients to serve. “The days are long, but the weeks seem to fly by,” he said.

After graduating from West Point in 1993, the Chino Hills, California, native spent three years with the Army Corps of Engineers. He might have continued a career as an engineer, but law and international relations had always interested him. Borcherding attended UVA Law under the Army’s Funded Legal Education Program and earned a master’s degree in foreign affairs from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the same time. He has since earned another master’s degree, in strategic studies, from the U.S. Army War College.