You get a letter telling you that you are unfit to keep serving. It arrives with a deadline, too, sometimes less than a week, and it sets in motion a process that will decide whether you keep your career or not. Whether you get a severance check, a retirement, health care for your family, or nothing.
Somewhere in that packet is a line about your right to consult a lawyer. In the Army, that line has led to the Office of Soldiers’ Counsel, a small unit of attorneys who exist for exactly this type of thing.
A growing number of soldiers are finding this line leads them to an office that says it can no longer be of assistance.
The Office of Soldiers’ Counsel has taken “dramatic cuts to its authorized positions over the past 12 months,” according to a May 27 Army memo reviewed by Task & Purpose, which first reported the cutbacks. Since May 2025, the memo says, the office has used a phased approach to limit its services to only those that are statutory.
Their scheduling website already details exactly what that means in practice. It is “unable to assist” soldiers going through the Medical Evaluation Board stage. It no longer accepts clients on the Temporary Disability Retired List. Soldiers, the notice says, “may secure private counsel for assistance at no expense to the Army.”
And as of July 1, according to the memo, the office stopped providing all legal services to non-active-duty National Guard and Reserve soldiers.
The Army has yet to disclose how many positions were cut.
What is “Statutory”
Statutory is doing all the work in that memo, explaining which soldiers can keep a lawyer and which ones lose one. No neutrality.
Army disability cases move through two processes. The first is the Medical Evaluation Board, where a soldier’s medical record is assembled. Here, the question of whether they meet retention standards gets answered. Second is the Physical Evaluation Board, which takes that record and decides whether they are fit and, if not, what disability rating they receive.
Under federal law, a soldier has a statutory right to a full and fair hearing at the formal Physical Evaluation Board. There is no equivalent statutory right to counsel at the Medical Evaluation Board.
However, here is where the Army made its recent move.
According to the Army’s own disability guidebook, Medical Evaluation Board counsel are the lawyers who help soldiers file rebuttals, request independent medical reviews, complete their board elections, and contest what goes into the file. They work with soldiers “as early as possible” in the process. The Physical Evaluation Board counsel, who remains, handles appeals.
Soldiers now get a lawyer at the stage where the record is argued, but no lawyer at the stage where the record is actually written.
What’s the Risk
A soldier found unfit can be separated with severance pay, or placed on the Permanent Disability Retired List, which carries retired pay and Tricare for the soldier and his dependents. The dividing line is the disability rating, and the rating flows from the record.
“When a service member waives their rights or accepts lower amounts of disability than they’re entitled to, that can be a very costly error,” Dan Conway, a former Marine Corps judge advocate who now represents troops in the disability process as a private attorney, told Task & Purpose.
“Maybe a soldier accepts a 20% rating when we could have gotten them placed on the Permanent Disability Retired List, and now they’re not getting Tricare for them and their dependents.”
These are also, by definition, the soldiers least equipped to fight without legal help.
“They’re doing it at the expense of some of the most vulnerable members of the military that may be suffering from serious injuries, significant emotional distress, mental health disorders,” Conway said, “people that may not be postured to make the best decisions about their future.”
Signal vs Noise
These drastic cuts did not arrive out of thin air; they were conceived and implemented tactically.
In March, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered what he called a “ruthless, no-excuses review” of the military’s legal offices, directing the services to align uniformed lawyers toward warfighting, military justice, operational law and the law of armed conflict, and to shift non-operational functions to civilian general counsels.
Military.com reported in May that the review had expanded department-wide, covering legal offices across all five services, with 45 days for the services to assess their own structures and six months to implement changes.
Sean Mangan, a former Army judge advocate and now a private military defense attorney, told Task & Purpose the Office of Soldiers’ Counsel cutbacks reflect those directives. He described the policy as a return to the pre-9/11 era, “which is, the military’s legal functions are about the military’s operations, and they’re not a full-service legal aid system.”
Free legal counsel in the disability process is, in fact, pretty new. It became a standard feature of the Integrated Disability Evaluation System, which was formally implemented in 2011 to link the Defense Department and Department of Veterans Affairs sides of a medical discharge into one single process.
Over this same period, the Army has been bleeding disability counsel. The Pentagon has been lending lawyers out.
In September, the Defense Department approved the transfer of up to 600 military and civilian attorneys to the Justice Department to serve as temporary immigration judges.
Twenty judge advocates had already been detailed to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C. In October, Hegseth also ordered the military to provide 48 more lawyers to the Justice Department for assignments in Memphis and near the southern border.
Army’s Answer
Army officials say the support is not disappearing but simply moving.
Heather Hagan, an Army spokesperson, told Task & Purpose that the Office of Soldiers’ Counsel is “transferring” its support to “trusted” Army National Guard and Reserve lawyers, and that the office has trained nearly 250 Reserve judge advocates over the past year, with more training scheduled.
Attorneys who work on these cases are skeptical that a trained generalist is the same thing as a specialist.
“Let’s face it, every Army Reserve JAG and Army Guard JAG has some primary duty to begin with, so unless they rededicate resources,” John Gately, a private military disability lawyer, told Task & Purpose, “I see people falling through the cracks.”
One more fact sits underneath all of it. Air Force and Navy officials told Task & Purpose that there have been no recent impacts to the Navy’s Disability Evaluation System Counsel Program or the Air Force’s Office of Disability Counsel. Whatever pressure produced this, it produced it in one service.
What Soldiers Can Do Now
Soldiers already in the process are not without options. None of them will replace a free specialist.
Ask what the office still covers. Get confirmation. The memo says the office is limiting itself to statutory services, which should preserve representation at the formal Physical Evaluation Board. If you are active duty and facing a formal board, contact the Office of Soldiers’ Counsel directly to confirm you have counsel rather than assuming it.
Use the liaison, but know the limits. Every soldier in the disability process is assigned a Physical Evaluation Board Liaison Officer and a VA Military Services Coordinator. They are required to explain the process and the compensation math. They are not your lawyer.
Understand what a veterans service organization can and cannot do. A representative from a VA-recognized veterans service organization, or VSO, can assist with the case. The Army’s own guidebook carries a warning worth repeating: representation by a VSO “may not be confidential in the absence of an official attorney-client relationship.”
Look for free counsel outside the Army. The American Bar Association’s Military Pro Bono Project is available to active-duty service members, including certain members of the Guard and Reserve. They’ll connect you and your family with volunteer civilian attorneys, but they accept cases only by referral from a military attorney. Soldiers cannot apply directly. Many state bar associations run military legal assistance programs, and some law school clinics take military and veterans’ cases, as well.
Hire counsel if you can. That is the way things are being done now. The letter will still arrive, the deadlines still exist, but you will have to do the legwork.
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