Tentatively, the top military leadership is opening the door to a major overhaul of its justice system, in order to combat sexual assault: removing prosecutions of the crime from the military chain of command.

Senior leaders have not endorsed the move outright, which would represent an enormous cultural shift and legal challenge. But the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Air Force's top general all signaled a new openness today to giving independent prosecutors power previously reserved for military commanders. It's a shift that's badly needed, say Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and other victims' advocates, because only a handful of tens of thousands of cases of sexual assault within the military get prosecuted today.

"We're not taking anything off the table," Secretary Chuck Hagel told Pentagon reporters when asked directly about the possible change, something long advocated by sexual-assault survivors. He pointed to a nine-member review panel recently created by Congress to give the Pentagon advice for overhauling its sexual-assault prevention and response efforts.

"The outside, independent review panel is so important here," Hagel said. "There are ten pieces of legislation in the House and the Senate to change components of all this reporting and the structure and who's accountable -- even taking it out of the chain of command. We're going to have to do something. We will do something." The panel is expected to deliver its recommendations by July 2014.

Hours before Hagel briefed reporters, the chief of staff of the Air Force, Gen. Mark Welsh III, said for the first time that he was "open" to removing at least some responsibility for prosecuting sexual assault from commanders. Just last week, both Welsh and Hagel expressed reluctance to take precisely that step. "That would just weaken the system," Hagel said in in a May 7 press conference.

The chain of command is a foundational structure of military discipline. But recently, that structure has proven to be less than perfectly stable. The armed forces are reeling from three high-profile recent arrests or investigations on sexual-assault related charges of Air Force and Army officers responsible for sexual-assault prevention efforts. President Obama yesterday summoned Hagel, Welsh, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey and the rest of the military leadership to the White House to demand the military promptly fix a vexing and longstanding problem.

Taking prosecutions outside of the chain of command is the biggest of the proposed fixes. The idea is that prosecutions within the chain of command create an incentive for higher-ranking officers to go easy on their subordinates. It additionally creates fears of reprisal for reporting a co-worker for sexual assault, which function as a deterrent to reporting the crime in the first place. According to the most recent military statistics, servicemembers reported only 3,374 cases of sexual assault out of an estimated 26,000 such incidents last year; only 38 percent of active-duty servicewomen who reported the offense said they experienced no reprisal.

"I feel if I didn't have to report to my chain of command and if military sexual trauma assault was not so hush and was being talked about more, I would have said something," ABC quoted an Army rape survivor saying.

But if the military isn't willing to relinquish sexual assault prosecutions from the chain of command, Congress is increasingly willing to legislate exactly that. Several recent House bills propose creating independent offices -- some civilian, some military, some mixed -- to take control of sexual assault cases. Those efforts got super-sized yesterday when Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand introduced a bipartisan, bicameral bill to remove the prosecutions of all crimes that carry a sentence of over a year from the chain of command.

Those legislative pushes place the military in a difficult position. Opposition to them risks making the military look like it's uninterested in solving its sexual assault problem. Yet the military really would be in uncharted territory by allowing independent prosecutors overseeing its affairs.

"We're looking for game-changers, really," Dempsey said. "Some of those congressional proposals could be game-changers."

Dempsey openly acknowledged some of the structural impediments to holding military sexual-assault perpetrators accountable within the chain of command. A military coming out of ten years of war might be too forgiving of sexual assault committed by someone with a distinguished service record.

"If a perpetrator shows up at a court martial and has a rack of ribbons and four deployments and a Purple Heart," Dempsey said. "there is certainly a risk that we might be too forgiving of that particular crime."

All of this remains tentative. Both Hagel and Dempsey alluded to unintended "second and third order effects" of changing military structure, including the accommodation of outside prosecutors. Commanders possess "life and death decision-making authority," Dempsey added. "I can't imagine going forward to solve this issue without commanders involved."

The panel won't deliver its recommendations until next year. And legislation takes time to pass. In the interim, Hagel issued a memo to commanders to immediately review the "credentials and qualifications" of any military recruiter, sexual-assault response coordinator and victims advocate to ensure they don't see even more officials responsible for sexual assault prevention committing the very acts they're supposed to prevent.

"We have in many ways failed," Hagel said. "Not one of these people in [military] leadership today that wants this to be their legacy."