I think that if you spoke to the chief military judge, you would find that he certainly seems to be comfortable with the complement of judges that he has right now.
If I could just clarify, though, the intent isn't to get rid of these reserve military panel judges. They would be appointed and have security tenure in the same way a full-time judge would have that tenure, the difference being that unlike the full-time judges, as in the civilian court structure, they aren't paid on a full-time basis. They would continue to hold that position until they reached retirement age, but the chief military judge would decide when he wanted to, for lack of a better term, call them out for service to perform a judicial function. It's just a means of providing a greater pool of individuals available to the chief military judge.
As I said, the extreme example is the mobilization example I talked about earlier, but there are many more practical day-to-day examples of how this could arise. For example, if you ended up with a case with six co-accused who were all being tried separately, having four judges would create a significant problem. We haven't faced that problem to date in our system, but six co-accused with four judges would create a significant problem for the chief military judge as he tried to find a judge who was not conflicted, based on something he'd done earlier. This panel would give him a pool of other people he could go to in order to resolve that type of situation.
It really is not intended to in any way undermine the tenure or judicial independence of this pool of, for lack of a better term, part-time individuals. They would remain in their positions; once appointed, they would remain there. It really would be up to the chief military judge as to how he chose to employ them, and when he employed them, of course, they would be paid for those services.
That's the intent here.
