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Opinion of the Court
ident may "detail" officers of the Navy to serve as superintendents or instructors at nautical schools. This contrasting treatment indicates rather clearly that Congress repeatedly and consistently distinguished between an office that would require a separate appointment and a position or duty to which one could be "assigned" or "detailed" by a superior officer.
The sections of the UCMJ relating to military judges speak explicitly and exclusively in terms of "detail" or "assign"; nowhere in these sections is mention made of a separate appointment. Section 826(a) provides that a military judge shall be "detail[ed]" to each general court-martial, and may be "detail[ed]" to any special court-martial. The military judge of a general court-martial must be designated by the Judge Advocate General, or his designee, § 826(c), but the appropriate Service Secretary prescribes by regulation the manner in which military judges are detailed for special courts-martial, and what persons are authorized to so detail them. Section 866, in turn, provides that military appellate judges shall be "assigned to a Court of Military Review." The appropriate Judge Advocate General designates a chief judge for each Court of Military Review, and the chief judge determines "on which panels of the court the appellate judges assigned to the court will serve and which military judge assigned to the court will act as the senior judge on each panel." Ibid. (emphasis added).
Congress' treatment of military judges is thus quite different from its treatment of those offices, such as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for which it wished to require a second appointment before already-commissioned officers could occupy them. This difference negates any permissible inference that Congress intended that military judges should receive a second appointment, but in a fit of absentmindedness forgot to say so.
Petitioners' alternative contention is that even if Congress did not intend to require a separate appointment for a mili-
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