Opinion ID: 77837
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Application of Feres rationales to private contractor agents

Text: To determine whether Presidential, a private contractor, is derivatively entitled to the government's Feres immunity, we must decide whether and how the policies underlying Feres apply to private contractor agents. The first Feres policy is ensuring that the government faces a uniform rule with respect to injuries incurred by soldiers incident to service. See Johnson, 481 U.S. at 689, 107 S.Ct. at 2068. The Court adopted in Feres a uniform rule of no liability in service-related tort suits brought by soldiers (apart from the statutory benefits provided by the government). See id. While the uniformity rationale does continue to apply to the government, it does not apply at all to private contractors. To apply the rationale to private military contractors would be highly anomalous. Government agencies in general (apart from the military) do not have the benefit of a Feres bar, and therefore must face the non-uniform tort law of the various states (so long as an explicit FTCA exception does not apply). See 28 U.S.C. § 1346(b). For example, the federal prison system must contend with non-uniform tort law. See United States v. Muniz, 374 U.S. 150, 162, 83 S.Ct. 1850, 1857, 10 L.Ed.2d 805 (1963). In Muniz, the Supreme Court expressly refused to extend the Feres uniformity rationale to the federal prison system. See id. (Without more definite indication of the risks of harm from diversity, we conclude that the prison system will not be disrupted by the application of Connecticut law in one case and Indiana law in another . . . .). Private contractor agents have no more pressing need for a uniform rule. If anything, they have far less exposure than a gigantic federal agency that would face non-uniform rules on a daily basis, and therefore much less risk of having to contend with varying law. [17] The first Feres rationale therefore does not apply to a private contractor such as Presidential. The second policy underlying the Feres bar is the cap on the government's liability for service-related injuries, set at the amount of statutory benefits provided to the service member. Johnson, 481 U.S. at 690, 107 S.Ct. at 2068. The government's liability is capped because it has compensated the soldier to some degree (by way of the statutory remedy). The Court has therefore implied that these benefits are all that Congress intended for the government to provide the soldier. See id. The cap policy also does not apply to the private contractor. The private contractor, unlike the government, has not had to pay anything to the soldier, and will not have to pay anything apart from what the soldier might recover in a tort suit. Nor is there any warrant to read the cap on the government's liability as an implied cap on the private contractor's. There is absolutely no indication that Congress, in providing statutory benefits for soldiers, intended them to substitute in any way for a remedy against private contractor agents of the military, or intended them to cap the liability of private contractors to soldiers they injure in the course of duty. We therefore decline to recognize the cap policy as a justification for applying the Feres bar to private contractors. [18] It is not surprising that the first two Feres policies apply only to the government, because they serve to protect distinctively sovereign interestsensuring that the government is not crippled by a non-uniform standard for soldiers' injuries incurred incident to service, and ensuring that the government's liability is capped at the amount of statutory benefits it provides to injured soldiers. The Supreme Court has itself implicitly recognized that these two Feres policies do not apply to individuals, such as private contractors. The Supreme Court has twice relied on the Feres policies, in another context, to refuse to create a Bivens cause of action against federal employees for service-related constitutional torts. On both occasions, it did not rely on the first two Feres rationales. See Chappell v. Wallace, 462 U.S. 296, 299, 103 S.Ct. 2362, 2365, 76 L.Ed.2d 586 (1983) (in a case refusing to imply Bivens action against superior officer where the soldier was injured incident to service, relied only on discipline rationale of Feres, not cap or uniformity); United States v. Stanley, 483 U.S. 669, 678-83, 107 S.Ct. 3054, 3061-63, 97 L.Ed.2d 550 (1987) (also relying, post- Johnson, on only the third rationale of Feres in refusing to create Bivens action against government employee where serviceman's injury was incident to service). Rather, the Court relied solely on the third Feres rationalepreventing interference with military discipline and military judgments. The Court eschewed reliance on the first two Feres rationales even though the defendant in each case was a government employeea special kind of common law agent. We therefore do not hesitate to find that these two policies do not apply to private contractors, even if they are agents of the military. On the other hand, we do believe that the third Feres policy potentially has some application to private contractor agents of the military. The third justification for the Feres bar is that it protects against interference with military discipline and sensitive military judgments. Johnson, 481 U.S. at 690, 107 S.Ct. at 2069. We have previously recognized that this rationale embodies two distinct concerns: (1) whether the suit requires the court to second-guess military decisions, and (2) whether the suit might impair essential military discipline. Shaw, 778 F.2d at 742 (punctuation and citation omitted). We described the military judgments strand as the classic separation of powers theory. Id. The essential military discipline strand, on the other hand, prevents disruption of the relationship between the service member and his military superiors and cohorts. Id. The discipline strand of the third Feres rationale does not have application in the context of private contractors. In Shaw, we noted that the essential military discipline rationale itself embodies two concerns: (1) the notion that a soldier might use the civilian courts to challenge the act or order of a superior officer; and (2) the idea that in a civilian suit of any sort involving a serviceman, members of the military might be compelled to testify against one another. Id. at 742. We concluded that neither concern would justify protection of the military contractor. In the first place, the concern that a soldier might use a suit to challenge a superior officer is absent because a private contractor is not in the chain of command. Id. at 742-43. That observation is equally true where the private contractor happens to be an agent of the government. Because the private contractor agent is not in the chain of command, a soldier cannot use a suit against the contractor to challenge the act or order of a superior officer. Id. at 742. In the second place, we concluded in Shaw that any risk to discipline from the process of trying a case against a private contractor was too remote to be accorded significant weight. Although we acknowledged that soldiers might have to testify on opposite sides in a suit against a private contractor, we stated that the likelihood of any profound disruption of discipline is negligible from testimony in suits against military contractors. Shaw, 778 F.2d at 743. We recognize that here too, in a suit against a private contractor agent, there may be soldiers testifying on opposite sides. But we agree with the Shaw Court that this does not present a significant threat to military discipline. [19] Our conclusion that the discipline policy does not have significant application to private contractor agents is fortified by the opinion of the four dissenters in Johnson, who set out several reasons why the discipline policy does not even apply strongly to the government itself. Justice Scalia said, It is strange that Congress' obvious intention to preclude Feres suits because of their effect on military discipline was discerned neither by the Feres Court nor by the Congress that enacted the FTCA (which felt it necessary expressly to exclude recovery for combat injuries). Perhaps Congress recognized that the likely effect of Feres suits upon military discipline is not as clear as we have assumed, but in fact has long been disputed . . . . Or perhaps Congress assumed that the FTCA's explicit exclusions would bar those suits most threatening to military discipline, such as claims based upon combat command decisions, 28 U.S.C. § 2680(j); claims based upon performance of discretionary functions, § 2680(a); claims arising in foreign countries, § 2680(k); intentional torts, § 2680(h); and claims based upon the execution of a statute or regulation, § 2680(a). . . . Or perhaps most fascinating of all to contemplate Congress thought that barring recovery by servicemen might adversely affect military discipline. After all, the morale of Lieutenant Commander Johnson's comrades-in-arms will not likely be boosted by news that his widow and children will receive only a fraction of the amount they might have recovered had he been piloting a commercial helicopter at the time of his death. Johnson, 481 U.S. at 699-700, 107 S.Ct. at 2073-74 (Scalia, J., dissenting, joined by three others) (emphasis added). We of course may not deny that the discipline rationale continues to apply to the government, even if the reasoning in the Johnson dissent has some force; the Johnson majority held that it still does. But we are perfectly free to hold that, given the arguably tenuous application of the discipline rationale to the government itself, there is no warrant to extend it to private contractors, a context in which its application is clearly even more tenuous. We are confident in our judgment that there is no substantial impact on military discipline from soldiers recovering for the torts of private contractors, and are free to draw that conclusion because neither this Court nor the Supreme Court has held that it does extend to private contractors. Indeed, in Shaw, we held the opposite. While we do not accept that the discipline portion of the third Feres rationale applies to private contractors, we do recognize that the other partthe risk of a tort suit interfering with sensitive military judgmentsdoes potentially apply to private contractor agents. As the Court in Johnson recognized, suits involving accidents that occurred incident to service may implicate[] the military judgments and decisions that are inextricably intertwined with the conduct of the military mission. Johnson, 481 U.S. at 691, 107 S.Ct. at 2069. Applying a tort law standard of care to sensitive military judgments is problematic for two reasons, both of which potentially apply to private contractor agents entrusted with executing or making such judgments. In the first place, there is a problem of institutional competence. Where sensitive military judgments are involved, courts lack the capacity to determine the proper tradeoff between military effectiveness and the risk of harm to the soldiers. For example, it is not possible for a court to develop a standard of care for a reasonably safe infantry assault on a fortified enemy outpost. See Chappell, 462 U.S. at 302, 103 S.Ct. at 2366 (The complex, subtle, and professional decisions as to the composition, training, equipping, and control of a military force are essentially professional military judgments . . . .) ( quoting Gilligan v. Morgan, 413 U.S. 1, 10, 93 S.Ct. 2440, 2446, 37 L.Ed.2d 407 (1973)); Aktepe v. United States, 105 F.3d 1400, 1404 (11th Cir.1997) ([C]ourts lack standards with which to assess whether reasonable care was taken to achieve military objectives while minimizing injury and loss of life.); Tiffany v. United States, 931 F.2d 271, 279 (4th Cir.1991) (noting that courts cannot develop standards for a prudent intercept). Rather than develop such standards where they lack the expertise, courts instead trust that the military is in the best position to determine the appropriate tradeoff between safety and combat effectiveness. When a private contractor agent is entrusted with making or executing such sensitive military judgments, courts would be similarly powerless to determine whether the agent appropriately balanced military effectiveness and the safety of the soldiers. See Boyle, 487 U.S. at 511, 108 S.Ct. at 2518 (offering as one reason for the military contractor defense the fact that determining liability would involve the balancing of many technical, military, and even social considerations, including specifically the trade-off between greater safety and greater combat effectiveness). The court would therefore be equally incapable of entertaining the tort suit. Second, even if courts could determine what a reasonable bombing or a reasonable intercept would be, it would violate the separation of powers for courts to second-guess the military's decision in a tort suit. These sorts of sensitive military judgments have been constitutionally committed to the political branches. See Stanley, 483 U.S. at 682, 107 S.Ct. at 3063 (emphasizing the insistence (evident from the number of Clauses devoted to the subject) with which the Constitution confers authority over the Army, Navy, and militia upon the political branches); Aktepe, 105 F.3d at 1404 (noting that it would express a lack of respect for the political branches of government by subjecting their discretionary military and foreign policy decisions to judicial scrutiny, notwithstanding the judiciary's relative lack of expertise in these areas). Even if courts were competent to develop liability standards in the area of sensitive military judgments, it would breach separation of powers to apply those standards to the military. It would similarly violate separation of powers for the courts to interfere with sensitive military judgments made or executed by private contractor agents of the military. The military has the constitutionally exclusive authority to make those kinds of judgments, and judicial oversight of the private contractor agents the military uses to execute those judgments would likewise violate separation of powers principles. This sensitive-military-judgments strand of the third Feres rationale embodies concerns about justiciability and separation of powers. It is thus related to the political question doctrine, which is a constitutional restraint on the jurisdiction of the federal courts. See Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, 217, 82 S.Ct. 691, 710, 7 L.Ed.2d 663 (1962) (stating that factors justifying abstention under political question doctrine include a lack of judicially discoverable and manageable standards and a textually demonstrable constitutional commitment of the issue to a coordinate political department). Demonstrating this close connection, when the Court has discussed the military judgments portion of the third Feres rationale, it has often mixed in reference to political question cases. See United States v. Shearer, 473 U.S. 52, 58, 105 S.Ct. 3039, 3043, 87 L.Ed.2d 38 (1985) ( citing Gilligan v. Morgan, 413 U.S. 1, 93 S.Ct. 2440, 37 L.Ed.2d 407 (1973)); Chappell, 462 U.S. at 301, 103 S.Ct. at 2366 ( citing Gilligan ). Our political question cases have, in turn, cited the third Feres rationale when discussing this concern about interfering with military judgments. See Aktepe, 105 F.3d at 1403 (citing Chappell and Stanley ). It is evident that the military judgments strand in Feres and the military judgments strand under the political question doctrine overlap and reinforce each other.