The brass agreed there was a “cancer” in the military, but their rigid, nonsensical response boiled down to: Trust us. We’ll fix the system, even though we don’t really believe it’s broken.

They were unanimously resistant to the shift that several of our allies have made, giving lawyers, rather than commanders, the power to take cases to court. This even though they were having a hard time coming up with examples of any commanders who had been removed from their posts for allowing a toxic climate on sexual assault.

In fact, the military honchos made it clear that, after months of public dismay, they hadn’t even gotten around to studying the systems our allies put in place to achieve objective decision making, where commanders can’t protect buddies or Top Gun criminals. “Talking to people who have managed this problem longer than we have seems to me the very easiest place to start,” chided Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri.

Eugene Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School, told me the arguments of the brass “boiled down to an almost mystical notion of the commanders’ responsibility. Why can’t we cut the strings to the British system we inherited from George III? The British are baffled by us. They gave control over major crimes to professional prosecutors years ago. It’s an institutional structure that has outlived its utility and credibility.”