Military and legal translation may well be the most demanding of all specialisms in applied linguistics, where fuzzy language relates to institutional-diplomatic or operational consequences. Juris-military discourse—where the domain of military and legal translation intersects, which is critical to any studies that look at the power dynamics between militarism and law—has not stimulated much academic interest in translation, particularly with respect to multilingual settings like Arabic–English. This paper is based on the corpus of 120 genuine Arabic military legal documents (rules of engagement, status-of-forces agreements, military tribunal proceedings and international humanitarian law instruments) in order to show some terminological problems as well as pragmatic asymmetries and institutional constraints arising within their English translations. Based on a qualitative methodology guided by corpus findings & 10 expert-informant interviews with licensed military translators and legal professionals, we isolate three key sources of translational friction:(1). The lack of existence of English-term equivalents for Arabic culture-laden conceptualisations within military law; (2.) Thus, we can see as factors (1) the distinct register between Arabic 'military formal' discourse vs Anglo-American legalese; and (2) the intra-impact of legislative drafting conventions with their inherently pragmatically underspecified products that are favoured in many Arab states. It was revealed that despite professional military translators using communicatively effective and appropriate compensation strategies such as functional equivalence, descriptive paraphrase and transposition in the majority of cases, these practices are still severely restricted by institutional style guides promoting literal fidelity over communicative adequacy. This paper introduces a novel domain-specific translation model called Juris-Military Equivalence Model (JMEM) that integrates Skopos-based functionalism with specializations of legal translation norms and systematicity of terminology to provide weaponized translations in high-threat military contexts. Finally, the paper concludes with implications for translator-training policies and policy harmonisation in international military forces.