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MILITARYETHICSReftecdtions on principles- the profession of arms,military leadership, ethical practices, war andmorality, educating the citizen-soldier.

DTICELECTE

1%87NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY PRESSWASHINGTON, DC

." document has been approvodfp'Z*Tublic release oand sale its'Cl-fibition Is unlimited.

Nadtoa DefenD s Universly Press Phibhiatim. To increase generalknowledge and inform discussion, NDU Press publishes books on sub-jects relating to US national security. Each year, in this effort, The Na-tional Defense University, through the Institute for National StrategicStudies, hosts about two dozen Senior Fellows who engage in originalresearch on national security issues. NDU Press publishes the best of thisresearch. In addition, the Press publishes especially timely or distinguish-ed writing on national security from authors outside the University, neweditions of out-of-print defense classics, and books based on conferencesconcerning national security affairs.

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LIsrary of Coure. Cataloglq-im-Pblcation Date

Military ethics.

"Collection ... assembled through the efforts of Colonel MahamWakin, Colonel Kenneth Wenker, and Captain James Kempr-P.

I. Military ethics. I. Wakin, Malham M. I. Wenker, Kenneth H. Ill.Kempf, James.U22.M4853 1987 17r.42

DTtoFirst printing: September 1987 copy

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CONTENTS

Foreword x-

Publisher's Prefaces-< X.iI

PART I. THE PROFESSION OF ARMS -

. PROFESSIONALS OR kIIRED9UNS?LOYALTIES ARETHE DIFFERENCE; 5

Manuel M. Davenport

ACODE OF ETHICS FOR.QFFICERS, 13

Richard T. DeGeorge

Il. *'MILITARY LEADERSHIP - -

_ MACHIAVELLI,MrJANAGEMENT, ANDMORAL LEADERSHIP, 33

James B. Stockdale

E £THICAL ASPECTS OF THEEXERCISE OF COMMAND 45

Roger L. Shinn

ETHICS AND THEMILITARY ORGANIZATION 61

Manuel M. Davenport

t'

-

viM contents

JW ORALITY AND THEMILITARY PROFESSION:ZOBLEMS ANDSOLUTIONS; 81 -

Charles F Hudlin

PART III. ETHICAL PRACTICES _

LEGITIMATE AVENUES OFMILITARY.ERUTEST IN ADEMOCRATIC §.OCIETY, 101

Richard A. Gabriel

WAITING FOR EURIPIDES' 119

Alfred Kern

WYHY DON'T WE FOLLOWTHEAULES? 1- 125

Philip A. Johnson

-'-ZHE ETHICS OF THELECTRONIC &EVOLUTION:

jZ1PLICATIONS FOR THE USIR FORCE 139

William Jt Wallisch

IV. ' WAR AND MORALITY -

,;:,jUCLEAR.PTERRENCE -ITS MORAL AND

ZOIICAL IMPLICATIONS~ (157

Noel Gayler

Contents ix

MORALITY IN TARGETINGOBJECTS OFkIILITARYVALUE: A RESPONSE 171

Paul R. Viotti

"IlLITARY NECESSITY ANDMORALITY - 177

Kenneh. Wenker

WAR GAMES, 185

( Joseph V. Potter

" QN MACHIAVELLI ANDVIETNAM 193-w

William E. McCarron

PART V. )- EDUCATING THE

CITIZEN-SOLDIER -

ITERARY PERCEPTION OF

THE AMERICAN MILITARY 203

Alfred Kern

\"- HUMANITIES AT THEHANOIHILTON, 215

Alfred Kern

,. EDUCATION FORLEADERSHIP AND§_URVIVAL: tHE &OLE OF

HE PRESSURE COOKERS 223

James B. Stockdale

FORE WORD

A LL of us respond in varying ways to thebeliefs and values of our families, our communities, andour nation. Members of the military services, however,must do more than respond to our commonly held be-liefs -they must be ready to risk their lives defendingthem. As a consequence, military men and women arenever far removed from the central issues of ethics andmorality.

Unlike most philosophical speculations, ethics is thestuff of real life, embodying justifications for personal andsocietal acts, revealing deepest-held principles throughconduct. As the essays in this book attest, when we ques-tion personal, community, or national ethics, we areresponding to a venerable and enduring part of humannature that compels us to take the measure of our prin-ciples and to make distinctions between right and wrong.

This collection demonstrates by its variety and rangethe complexity of personal, community, and nationalmores that come to bear upon the performance of militaryduties. Without such constant reexamination of ethicalprinciples, our national defense could risk answeringmilitary threats only in terms of convenience, gain, or sim-ple expedience. The National Defense University is happyto contribute these essays to that continuing examination

of ethical issues which is so crucial to military life.

Bradley C. HosmerLieutenant General, US Air ForcePresident, National Defense University

4i

PUBLISHER'S PREFACE

THESE ESSAYS examine a wide range ofethical issues facing our military professionals,without emphasizing certain issues or avoiding othersbecause of their sensitivity or difficulty. The collec-tion focuses on ethical standards and the reconcilia-tion of standards with personal internal conflicts.

Many of these articles first appeared in the Jour-nal of Professional Military Ethics, sponsored by theUnited States Air Force Academy. Several wereoriginally presented at the Joint Services Conferenceon Professional Ethics, a conference hosted annuallyby the National Defense University in Washington,DC. One, by Admiral James B. Stockdale, was firstdelivered as an Andrew R. Cecil distinguished lectureat the University of Texas at Dallas.

The collection was assembled through the effortsof Colonel Malham Wakin, Colonel KennethWenker, and Captain James Kempf. Colonel Wakinis Permanent Professor and Head of the Departmentof Philosophy and Fine Arts of the United States AirForce Academy; Colonel Wenker and Captain Kempfwere the first Editor and Managing Editor of theAcademy's Journal of Professional Military Ethics.

XXi

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THE PROFESSIONOF ARMS

Manuel M. Davenport

PROFESSIONALS OR HIREDGUNS? LOYALTIES ARETHE DIFFERENCE

IN THE CONTEMPORARY literature of pro-fessional ethics, two different ways of determiningwhether an occupation is a profession are commonlyused. First, the historical approach simply asks, "Hasthis occupation been recognized in the history ofcivilization to be a profession?" The second oranalytic approach asks, "Does this occupation meetthe currently accepted standards of a profession?"These standards state:

The work done by members of this occupation isrecognized by the public to be crucial and necessary.

in order to enter this occupation certain specifiedminimal requirements must be met.

Manuel M. Davenport is a professor of philosophy atTexas A&M University. He was the distinguished visitingprofessor of philosophy at the US Air Force Academy forthe 1980-81 academic year. This article, reprinted from theUS Air Force Academy Journal of Professional MilitaryEthics, September 1981, was originally published in ArmyMagazine, May 1980. Copyright 1980 by the Associationof the United States Army. Reproduced by permission.

6 Afmt"e M. Devnnpfr

Members of this occupation state and enforce acode of ethical responsibilities.

Regardless of which of these two approaches isused it is clear that military service is a profession.Along with medicine, law and the priesthood it hasbeen recognized since at least the eighth century inWestern civilization, and since 2500 B.C. in Asia, as aspecial calling.

Today, if we use the analytic approach, the workof the military is recognized by the public as crucialand necessary; to enter military service requiresspecial training and qualifications, and ethicalresponsibilities are stated in the various codes ofmilitary justice and enforced by various types ofcourts-martial.

Members of all professions - whether physicians,teachers, engineers or members of the armedforces - share certain common ethical responsibilitiesor duties. Their paramount duty is to promote thesafety and welfare of the general public, which intoday's shrinking world means the safety and welfareof the human species. Next, they are obligated to useall their skills and knowledge to serve their clientsand, finally, at the lowest level of priority they areobligated to act to promote the dignity and status oftheir profession.

Each profession, however, has its own peculiarethical responsibilities which arise from the peculiarrelationship between professional and client becauseof the nature of service rendered and requested. Inteaching, for example, the professional is required tomake frequent and public assessments of the client'sintellectual progress and, thus, the teacher must beimpartial in grading and discourage cheating by thestudent in test situations.

PWefuuoak or Hirad Gum? 7

In medicine, the physician must decide whetherto let a terminally ill client die now or later. Teachers,except by a very bad analogy, do not have to makesuch decisions and, fortunately, physicianis do nothave to adjust their treatment according to theirpatient's ability to solve quadratic equations.

The point is that in each profession specialethical problems must be faced because in each theclient-professional. relationship varies according tothe unique kind of service the client seeks and the pro-fessional is qualified to provide.

In order to consider what special ethical respon-sibilities arise in the military profession, we must askfirst, "Who is the client?" In most professions, theprofessional can clearly distinguish between hisclients and the public or humanity at large because inmost callings the clients are a selected subset of thepublic or humanity.

Patients seek out physicians, who may refuse totreat them. Students, in most cases, must meet prere-quisites in order to work with particular teachers. Butif you are in the military profession it is quite difficultto distinguish your clients from humanity at large orthe public in general.

The laws of war do make it clear, however, thatthe military professional must distinguish between hisclients and humanity.

Such laws have consistently held that crimesagainst humanity are not justified simply because theoffender is acting under the orders of a militarysuperior and this principle, following the Nurembergtrials of 1945, has become firmly entrenched in themilitary law of the United States.

The paramount duty then of the military profes-sional is to promote the safety and welfare of

U MANUel M. Dwawet

humanity and this duty, according to military law,takes precedence over duties to clients, who as hisfellow citizens are but a particular portion of thehuman race.

Having distinguished the clients from humanityat large, it must be admitted that the military profes-sion is still peculiar in that its members serve anunusually large clientele. But it is not the magnitudethat deserves consideration-after all, political of-ficials can and do serve millions of clients on a regularbasis-rather it is the remoteness from clients thatwarrants attention.

Political officials can, and do, make personalcontact with their clients, but such personal contact isgenerally avoided and held to be unnecessary by bothmilitary professionals and their clients.

This remoteness between the warrior andcivilian - like the remoteness between a policemanand law-abiding citizen -arises from the fact that inboth cases service to client is rendered best in theabsence of the client. Civilians and citizens do notwant wars waged or criminals pursued in their frontyards. If such dangerous proximity is necessary, thenthe professionals have already failed.

This fact, that clients of those who engage inviolence seek distance from the professionals theyhire, explains, I believe, two common phenomena inmilitary life.

When I was stationed at Ft. Bliss, Tex., in 1950, Inoticed that many shops posted signs reading, "Dogsand soldiers not welcomel" This puzzled me so much,that years later I recalled and related my reaction toGen. Harold K. Johnson, then chief of staff.

His comment was, "Son, they don't want us at all

Profesdonats or Hire Guns? 9

unless there is a war and then they don't want us athome."

Not only does the peculiar nature of the client-professional relationship in military service causecivilians to resist close association with military per-sonnel, but it also draws members of the military pro-fession closer together.

I did not serve long in the Army, but I have neverexperienced before or since such a bonding, such awillingness to ignore traits that in civilian life wouldhave been intolerable, such a feeling that in somesense every man in my unit was, with me, part of thesame primitive organism.

As J. Glenn Gray points out in his classic work,The Warriors:- Reflections on Men in Battle, this feel-ing of unity, of fellowship, increases in combat situa-tions:

[this fellowship] ... at first develops through the con-sciousness of an obstacle to be overcome by common ef-fort.... We feel earnest and happy at such momentsbecause we are liberated from our individual impotenceand are drunk with the power that union with our fellowbrings ... [but] there is something more and equally im-portt... I believe it is nothing less than the assurance ofimmortality that makes possible ... the fighter's impulseto sacrifice himself for a comrade, [which is] ... an intrin-sic element in the association of organized men in pursuitof a dangerous and difficult goal.

As Mr. Gray makes most clear, members of themilitary profession are pushed and drawn into afellowship because in serving their clients they are thecustodians of legalized violence. The citizens in sanc-tioning and assigning such power to the military areboth relieved and fearful -a- relieved because now theycan exercise power without great personal risk, but

10 Manuel M. ADaV.#pe

fearful because they are uncertain the power will berelinquished upon demand.

This fear is not without basis. It is the duty ofany professional to promote the dignity and status ofhis profession, and the military profession does notpossess maximum dignity and status when militarydecisions are based on purely political considerations.

Moreover, as we have seen, the military profes-sion is bound by a sense of fellowship that is almostinherently anti-civilian, a sense of fellowship that hasan additive effect upon the normally intoxicating in-fluences of possessing the ultimate powers of destruc-tion.

Yet, duty to client must take priority over duty tothe profession, and in this nation we recognize this bythe principle of civilian control of the military.

According to his memoirs, President HarryTruman believed that Gen. Douglas MacArthur was asuperior strategist and the best possible architect of anew Japan. But he also believed the principle ofcivilian control of the military was more important inthe long run than the future of Japan, MacArthur oreven Truman.

It is a principle necessary to the preservation ofdemocracy; this we all acknowledge. But it is also aprinciple necessary to the preservation of profes-sionalism itself. When members of any professionplace a higher value upon the good of the professionthan the good of their clients, their professiondeclines in proficiency and competence.

When professionals, whether physicians ormilitary officers, care more about their prestige andstatus than the interests of those they serve, mistakesare buried, incompetents are protected, and criminalbehavior is covered up. And this is even more likely to

Profeasinals o, Hired Gem,? 11

happen among those professionals who constitute afellowship of violence because they are feared andmisunderstood, even when most professional.

I have attempted thus far to draw attention totwo ethical problems which I believe weigh uniquelyupon the military profession, and do so because themilitary profession is unique in being charged withthe exercise of ultimate violence on behalf of a clientnation that tolerates its existence only as a necessaryevil.

As a result, the military profession is tempted toexercise the power granted by its clients without limitor restriction and plead that this is necessary in orderto serve the best interests of its clients. The fellowshipof violence does "liberate from individual impotence"and make "drunk with power," but the military pro-fessional's highest duty, which is to serve the good ofhumanity, requires the exercise of individualknowledge and freedom of choice.

It is all too easy as a member of the military pro-fession to set aside such individual responsibilities.All too often, as Glenn Gray noted, it is easy to say,"When I raised my right hand and took that oath, Ifreed myself of the consequences of what I do." Tocommit deeds of violence without the usual conse-quences that society visits upon the violent seems,Gray writes, "at first a bit unnatural but for many notunpleasant. All too quickly it could become a habit."

But, as Gray also points out, such a habit willeither destroy one's conscience completely, and thusone's ability to act as a responsible individual, or itwill lead to contempt for self and all others.

The military professional is tempted also -and

this I believe is the stronger temptation -to resist thedirection of civilian clients, withdraw tightly into the

12 Mosuwl M. Davenpor

circle of professional fellowship and make its preser-vation and perpetuation his only purpose. To do sowould destroy in time his clients and their values. Butfirst and more quickly it would destroy the pride inbeing professional, the esprit de corps, that makes thedifference between being a professional and a hiredgun.

To be a professional is above all to possess asense of calling. What calls one person to be a physi-cian, another to be a teacher and yet another to be amilitary officer is a mystery to be unraveled only inpursuit of the calling. As a teacher, I believe there issomething in the nature of reality itself that seeks tobe revealed by the exercise of human reason, and as Ihave pursued this profession this belief has beenverified.

The universe opens itself to our rational probingsand as it does it reveals to us hidden depths in ourown human natures. Through teaching, I am able tobring myself and others into an increasingly closerharmony with reality - we become more and more athome in our world.

The same is true, I believe, of the military profes-sion. It may sound strange to those who have neverbelonged to the fellowship of violence or who protestthat war must be abolished at all costs to hear that thenature of reality itself seeks to be revealed by the exer-cise of the military calling.

But Glenn Gray, who spent four years in combatduring World War II, drew a similar conclusion: "It isrecorded in the holy scriptures that there was oncewar in heaven ... which must mean that the finalsecrets of war must be sought ... in the nature ofbeing itself."

Richard T. DeGeorge

A CODE OF ETHICSFOR OFFICERS

THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC BISHOPS'PASTORAL on nuclear war, the film The Day After,and the popular discussion surrounding the deploy-ment of Pershing Il and cruise missiles in Europe allclearly indicate that many people in the United Stateshave concerns about the morality of war. They haveyet to fully digest issues of morality in war raised byViet Nam. And peace-keeping operations such as inLebanon raise for them moral questions about the useof the military in peace, too.

These concerns are serious and legitimate bothfor Americans in general and for those in politics andin the armed forces themselves. Yet most Americans,already cynical about the government's concern formoral issues, would be amazed to find any officialconcern for and discussion of the morality of theseissues within the military. But such ethical thinking isgoing on in the military. Moreover, it should go on atall levels of the military; such thinking should be

Professor Richard T. DeGeorge is with the Department ofPhilosophy of the University of Kansas. This article isreprinted from the US Air Force Academy Journal of Pro-fessional Military Ethics, February 1984.

14 Richard T. DeGeors

promoted; and the general public should know it istaking Place and know what's being discussed.

Developing an ethical code -initially for of-ficers - is another way to address the concerns above.Whether we should develop an ethical code for of-ficers does not hinge on whether the military is a pro-fession. For although being a profession is one reasonto develop an ethical code, it isn't the only reason.And independent of whether the military is a profes-sion, a case can be made for developing such a code,providing it is a good one. Too often codes simplyembody the moral intuitions of those producingthem.- More important than writing down moral intui-tions or norms, however, are the moral argumentsdefending such intuitions or norms.

I shall speak of a code, but the purposes to beserved by a code might be served as well by a series ofwhite papers on the role of ethics in the military.Developing a code, or a series of white papers, canhelp develop ethical thought in the military; it cangive legitimacy to raising moral issues by people in themilitary; and it can signal to the general public thatthe military does take ethics into consideration.

The mini-code I shall develop will not, of course,attempt to replace the UCMJ, though reflection onthe former might lead to some revisions in the latter.Nor should any code of ethics for officers attempt tobe a complete moral code, for the ordinary moralnorms that apply to all people apply in the military aswell.

By developing a code I shall show how a codemight be constructed and so implicitly reply to thosewho say codes cannot be developed. I shall,moreover, emphasize those qualities necessary for a

A Code of Ethic fo, Officer 15

military officer that are new or frequently over-looked. The resulting mini-code may not look typical,but will, I hope, throw light on aspects of militaryethics that can be assimilated into a fuil code.

An ethical code for officers should tie into theproper function of officers. This function, which isthe source of officers' unique moral responsibilities,should in turn tie into the more general mission of thearmed forces. But this mission cannot simply be takenas given. For if the mission is to provide a startingpoint for the generation of moral norms, it must itselfby morally justifiable. The first task, therefore, is tosee if and to what extent the mission of the military ismorally justifiable, and only then to use that missionas a guide to an ethical code for officers.

The military is frequently considered one way toimplement a country's political policy in the interna-tional arena. The traditional view of the military isthat its function is to wage war. That is seen as its mis-sion as weil.

The traditional view is only partially accurate.And at best it is morally justifiable only if the politicalpolicy it implements is morally justifiable. Aggressivewars have always been considered immoral. A pri-mary task of the military today, moreover, is defense,not aggression. So the appropriate primary role of themilitary is to keep peace, as well as to wage war and todefend the country's legitimate interests and ter-ritorial integrity. These interests extend to the protec-tion of friendly nations and in no way precludealliances. But keeping the peace and fighting onlydefensive wars is the military's mission.

This thesis seems to be inherent in the very notionof deterrence. The military power of the United Statesstands ready to be used. Simply by standing ready it

16 Richard T. DeGeorse

deters those who might wish somehow or somewhereto attack it or its vital interests. It serves by standing,and it is preferable from a moral point of view that itbe successful by standing rather than by engaging inaction. For, whenever the military engages in action,the certainty of death, damage, injury, and sufferingis great. The poet's line "They also serve who onlystand and wait" seems especially appropriate for ourmilitary.

Now if part of the proper mission of the militaryis to preserve the peace, then peace should receive atleast as much emphasis as war. So we can point to oneof the virtues military officers should cultivate - a vir-tue that may at first seem odd. That virtue ispeacefulness. My purpose in starting with this virtuerather than with some of the traditional virtues ofloyalty or courage or honor is to point out thatpeacefulness is at least as central to the military's mis-sion as the others, and peacefulness has implicationsfor the military that we usually overlook. For thisreason it should be made part of our code.

What does the virtue of peacefulness mean, andhow might it fit as a component of an Ethical Codefor Officers?

Peacefulness, as a virtue, requires first that anofficer prefer peace to war. It's possibly true that of-ficers have something to gain by engaging in war. Inwar they are promoted faster than in peace; they areactive instead of passive; they have the excitementsome of them join the military for. Officers aretrained to fight and in war they can distinguishthemselves in a variety of ways. This tension betweenofficers' personal interest in war and their nation'sdesire for peace makes the virtue of peacefulness allthe more necessary.

A Code of Ethics for Officer 17

Preferring peace to war has implications for theway officers train, plan, and act. It need not impedetheir ability to act immediately if appropriate. But itdoes affect their view of their mission and the properway to fulfill it. To emphasize this, the first item of anEthical Code for Officers might read: (1) 1 shallprefer peace to war, and realize that the militaryserves most effectively when it deters and so preventswar rather than when it engages in war.

Peacefulness generates in its turn the need to em-phasize the virtue of restraint. Restraint may at firstseem to be a weak - in former times one might evenhave said a feminine -virtue. It does not seem tosquare well with the virtue of courage, typical of themilitary; nor with the virtue of boldness, which has aring of the masculine and of strength. Yet such a view

missseveral essential aspects of restraint. First,restraint is the ability to control oneself and one's ac-tion by reason and will. In Friedrich Nietzsche's ap-proach, self-restraint was one of the virtues of themaster, not of the slave. It takes training and will toexercise restraint. Any weakling can give vent to hisemotions, can succumb to the slightest temptation,can yield to the impulse of the moment. Only those ofstrong will, only those who have the self-mastery andself-control the stoics, and later Nietzsche, spoke ofare capable of restraint. Far from being a weak vir-tue, restraint is a strong one. Think briefly of a prize-fighter. His rusts are held legally to be lethal weapons;he must exercise special restraint in the use of them.While others may be tempted to respond to an insultby hitting the insulter, the prize-righter is especiallyprecluded from doing so. The analogy of the prize-fighter makes clear the point of restraint with respectto the military.

18 Richard T. D~og

Society gives the military a monopoly on the useof the major instruments of force. Society does notpermit access to these powerful weapons to any otherindividual or portion of society -the police included.It is an enormous instance of trust. It is reasonable togive this monopoly to the military only on conditionthat the military will exercise the greatest restraint inits use. In some countries the military uses the forceunder its control to its own benefit-to topplepolitical regimes, to secure power and governmentalcontrol for itself. It is the trust and expectation of theAmerican people and of the system of government inwhich we live that the force entrusted to the militarywill be used only as directed by the legitimatelyelected government. The military is not to use itagainst the people, the source of their power. In oursociety, this means the military is subservient to thepolitical order, with the President of the UnitedStates the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces.The trust is enormous, and the corresponding burdenon those who assume that trust and have custody ofthe monopoly of force is likewise enormous.

The obligation of restraint means more than this,however. Not only is the military to exercise restraintin using its might and power only for purposes sanc-tioned by the people through the political system, butthe military is also expected and required to userestraint in carrying out the tasks assigned to it.Restraint is part of the very notion of a just war.There are rules of war, and the exercise of restraintmeans force must be directed against the enemy, notagainst civilians or non-combatants. This is part ofeveryone's general obligation not to kill others exceptin self-defense, and then only when necessary. Whereothers might be tempted to kill indiscriminately, the

A Code of Ethics for Officers 19

military professional will use the force required, butonly the force required. As Sergeant York well knew,where possible it is preferable to take one's enemiesprisoner rather than kill them; where surgical strikesare possible, these are preferable to the indiscriminateuse of force. The problem of the moral legitimacy ofnuclear war hinges on the proper use of force. Andthe restraint necessary when one has at one's disposalsuch weapons is clear and beyond dispute. Lack ofrestraint on the part of the military in today's worldmight all too easily lead to the destruction ofmankind.

In this regard, the obligation of restraint isgreater on both the American and the Soviet militarythan on others. For both of these groups have accessto a store of force that other nations and theirmilitary do not have. Nor will the absence ofnecessary restraint on the part of the military in othercountries have the same consequences for mankind aswill the lack of restraint on the part of the UnitedStates or the Soviet Union.

The greater one's power, the greater one's obliga-tion of restraint. It is the exercise of this restraint thatsometimes makes superpowers look impotent. But weall know better than that.

Although the presence of nuclear weapons in-creases the need for restraint, it does not change thenecessity for restraint on lower and less dramaticlevels. Officers owe it to their men to exerciserestraint in time of war, exposing them to danger onlywhen and to the degree necessary. If we were to con-sider restraint as an Aristotelian moral virtue, itwould fall between inability to act on the one extremeand rashness on the other. Restraint is not timidity. Itis the child born of power and responsibility, It is of

20 Rkchuid T. PD~er.

less need for the weak, and of the most urgentnecessity for the strong. Those who bear the monop-oly of force in our society have, I suggest, a specialdemand of restraint placed upon them, and requirethe virtue of restraint to a degree not required ofothers.

The military in general has a special moralobligation for restraint, and each of its membersshares this obligation by belonging actively to thegroup. Each of the members has the obligation notonly to live up to proper standards of the military butto make sure that other members do so also. Sincesociety gives a monopoly of force to the military, it isthe obligation of each of the officers of the militarynot only to use that force properly, but to see to itthat others within the military do so also. Respon-sibility for the proper use of force is both the respon-sibility of each of the officers of the military and theresponsibility of the military as a whole.

If an Ethical Code for Officers were establishedit might well have as a component: (2) 1 shall use theutmost restraint in the use of force, using only asmuch as necessry to fulfill my mission.

The restraint mandated of the military, more-over, takes on a special focus when joined with ourthird virtue. This virtue is less controversial but morecomplicated than that of restraint. It is the virtue ofobedience, a virtue which for the military officer isdoubly complex.

According to Nietzsche, courage and restraintwere master virtues, but obedience was a slave virtue.And since obedience is often considered a virtue prop-er to children and subordinates, obedience as a vir-tue of the military officer must be carefully analyzed.Obedience for the military officer is doubly complex

A Cede of Ethics for 0111w, 21

because every military officer must both take and giveorders, and because every officer, insofar as he fills arole or position in the military structure, obeys andcommands both as someone filling a role and as an in-dividual moral being.

I shall unpack some of the implications of thisfor the officer after stating two commonplaces. First,no one is morally permitted to do what is immoral.Second, every officer is not only an officer but also ahuman being. Since human beings are moral beings,no one ceases to be a moral being by becoming orbeing a military officer. Officers fill their roles, butthey are morally responsible as individuals for whatthey do in those roles. These truisms have importantimplications for obedience.

Obedience involves doing what one is commandedto do by a superior, and it always has a dual aspect.For in obeying a command, one always does two ac-tions (or one action with a dual description). One ac-tion is the action of obeying. The other action is doingwhatever it is that one is commanded to do. The firstact, that of obeying, consists in doing the second ac-tion, namely what one is commanded to do. But it isimportant to distinguish the two. For although we maysay obedience is a virtue and one acts morally in obey-ing one's legitimate superior, human beings are nevermorally permitted to do what is immoral. So if one'slegitimate superior commands one to do what is im-moral - for instance, to kill innocent people - one can-not have the moral obligation to obey that command:and if one does obey, such obedience is not virtuousbut vicious.

Actions are not made right or wrong by any in-dividual's flat or command. They are right or wrongbecause of the kinds of actions they are or because of

22 Rkchard T. Deerze

their consequences or for some similar reason. If theyare immoral, they cannot be made moral by beingcommanded by someone. But there are many actionsthat in themselves are neither morally right or wrongif commanded or forbidden by one in authority. Inthis sense obedience is said to be a moral virtue andacting as one is told by a superior is morallyobligatory. Such actions might be said to be indirectlymorally obligatory. They are not obligatory inthemselves but only if commanded by legitimateauthority for valid reasons.

The obedience expected of children is obedienceto the legitimate commands of their parents, in areaswhere parents have the legitimate authority to guidethem, set rules for their welfare, and so on. A com-parable claim is true in the military. Legitimateauthority is specified in the table of organization ofeach branch of the armed forces. The ranks of of-ficers indicate a hierarchy of authority, and certaininternal links spell out the area of legitimate com-mand. In the army a company commander can giveorders to his lieutenants that other captains are notauthorized to give them, for instance, concerning therunning of the company. The President, as Com-mander-in-Chief, has the authority to command thehighest general -a fact General MacArthur re-cognized, and a fact that keeps the military by rightsubservient to the political realm.

Legitimate orders are those coming from legiti-mate authorities, in areas in which they have authori-ty to make decisions and issue commands, alwayssubject to the restriction that what they command isnot immoral. Their commands, if they are to belegitimate, must always respect those whom they

A Cede. of Mks fo' 0111cm 23

command as moral beings. Subordinates are notslaves or machines, but human beings.

In formulating an Ethical Code for Officers wemight therefore propose two additional principles: (3)I shall obey all legitimate orders, but only legitimateorders; and (4) 1 shall always remember that thosebeneath me are moral beings worthly of respect and Ishall never command them to do what is immoral.

Of course, as guidelines, these hinge on anunderstanding of what is moral and what is not, andpresuppose such understanding.

Commands are not always direct orders to do aspecific action: "Turn right!" "Halt!" "March!"Orders, especially to officers, are frequently broadcommands: "Free the hostages!" "Take that hill!""Secure a beachhead within 24 hours!" "Protect theleft flank!" and so on. They prescribe an objectiveand leave the means of securing that objective up tothe person commanded, expecting him, as a profes-sional, to use his skill and judgement.

Commands given from the top, therefore, filterdown for their execution. At each level they typicallyget translated into a series of more specific orders.The command to take a town might be given by ageneral to a regimental commander, who in turnissues implementing orders to his battalion com-manders, who in turn issue different implementingorders to their company commanders, and so ondown the line. At each stage below the initial one andbefore the final one each person both gets and givescommands. At each stage each person is constrainedby morality not to obey an immoral command andnot to command what is immoral. Unless clearly im-moral - for instance, an order to kill innocentcivilians - most orders are routinely accepted and

24 Richad T. De~eorge

implemented, and the evaluation is automatic, withmoral questions raised only in exceptional cir-cumistances.

In the chain of command, there is a certainamount of discretion in any order that states an endbut does not specify a means. As moral beings,however, we are responsible not only for our own ac-tions but also for the chain of actions that we initiate.

The commander who says, "Do this. I don't carehow you do it but do it," is morally responsible forhow the job he commands gets done. Good com-manders must care how a job gets done. The injunc-tion to use only the amount of force required to dothe job, for instance, sets limits on what is morallypermissible. And clearly there are other limits. Im-agine, for instance, the command to win, no matterhow - no matter whether innocent civilians are killed,no matter whether one's own men are lost inunreasonable and unnecessary numbers and ways, orno matter whether nuclear weapons are introduced inthe last-ditch effort to win. Those who issue suchcommands are responsible for the commands. Morestringently still, commanders are morally responsiblefor the ways their orders are carried out, even if theyaren't issued with any intention of commanding whatis immoral. So those in authority must consider bothwhether their orders are justifiable, and whether theycan be carried out morally. Moreover, through ap-propriate SOP or specific guidelines (such as the in-culcation of norms through an ethical code) com-manders are morally required to make sure that theirorders are not immorally carried out. This principlewas affirmed in the case of General Yamashita at theend of World War 11. An officer who does not care

A Code. of Ethics for Officrs 2

how his orders are carried out both acts immorallyand does not deserve to be an officer.

A code might make this clear by specifying: (5) 1am responsible for what I command and for how myorders are carried out.

It might be argued an officer merely fills a cer-tain position in a hierarchy. He plays a role in a com-plex organization. He does not determine his op-ponent -that's a political decision. The armed forcesare. given a task not of their choosing. They aretrained to fulill it. And an essential part of their suc-cess consists in immediate, obedient response toorders from a superior. This is drilled into them. Tointroduce moral considerations is wrongheaded, failsto understand the nature of the military and the im-portance of orders and obedience, ignores the natureof combat, and is the prejudice of academic theoreti-cians or philosophers, sitting in the security of theiroffice armchairs.

The objection is a standard one concerning rolesand the supposed overriding obligation when in a roleto do what the role requires. As an individual, an of-ficer may be kind and care for his men. He does notwish them to die. But as a military commander, hav-ing been given an objective, he must obey orders andissue appropriate commands even though he knowsthat as a result some, perhaps many, of his men, andperhaps he himself, may be killed.

In reply, nothing I have said denies the legiti-macy of roles and the obligations of those in roles todo what is required by and for the organization, evenif harm comes to some people as a result of the ac-tion.

But since we are never morally permitted to dowhat is immoral, we are not permitted to do so in a

26 Richard . DeGeorg.

role any more than we are permitted to do so as in-dividuals. The instant obedience expected in battle iscompatible with refusal to do what is immoral.Military training may attempt to make obedienceautomatic; some leaders may even wish to makesoldiers into automata or machines. But that's im-possible. Military personnel remain human and moralbeings, no matter what their rank, role, or position.And not all orders require automatic response. Clear-ly an order specifying only ends leaves the means upto those commanded. It is expected they will thinkabout the best and most appropriate way to secure theobjective. In such instances automata would beuseless. We depend on the ability of the officer giventhe objective to decide, on the basis of the situationand his training, intelligence, and skiff, what needs tobe done. The proper response to such a command is amorally responsible one.

Stiff others may balk at the idea that it is immoralto command the impossible. For military legends -Alexander, Hannibal, and Patton come to mind - aremade of those who did the seemingly impossible. Butwe have to distinguish those instances in which a com-mander ordered others to do the impossible fromthose in which a commander leads his men in an at-tempt to do what seems impossible. The difference isimportant. For the willingness to endure extremehardships with subordinates in an attempt to achievean objective is prima facie evidence an officer is notusing his subordinates as a means only, but is askingof them only what he is asking of himself as well. A

* sixth component of an Ethical Code for Officers sug-* gests itself: (6) 1 will never order thawe under me to do

what I would not myself be willing to do in a likesituation.

A Cede of Ethics!. for ffm 27

Obedience is a virtue. It is not only for children.For adults it is a difficult virtue. When one is on thereceiving end of an order, obedience requires puttinganother's will and priorities over one's own. Whenone is on the commanding end, it requires theassumption of responsibility, perhaps responsibilityfor an end about which one has doubts or reserva-tions. When viewed in this way obedience is indeednot a slave virtue, as Nietzsche suggests, but a mastervirtue, full of strength.

I have said enough to suggest how a Code ofEthic for Officers might be derived. My mini-codereads:

(1) 1 shall prefer peace to war, and realize thatthe military serves most effectively when it deters andso prevents war rather than when it engages in war.

(2) 1 shall use the utmost restraint in the use offorce, using only as much as necessary to fulfill mymission.

(3) 1 shall obey all legitimate orders, but onlylegitimate orders.

(4) 1 shall always remember that those beneathme are moral beings worthy of respect and I shallnever command them to do what is immoral.

(5) lam responsible for what I command and forhow my orders are carried out.

(6) 1 will never order those under me to do what Iwould not myself be willing to do in a like situation.

Obviously, these six itemrs don't constitute either acomplete or an ideal code. For purposes of illustra-tion I have chosen three virtues -peacefulness,restraint, and obedience -because they are frequentlyignored and because they are important with respectto the mission of the military. I would hope that any

28 Richad T. DeGeorge

code, however, would not only list items to bememorized but that every officer would be expectedto be able to derive and justify each of the items.

The code in its full form should contain a de-tailed discussion of the meaning and implementationof the items it contains. A code that simply, for exam-ple, listed the components I discussed above, withoutany indication of how they were developed and ofhow they might be applied, would not be very useful.I derive the components I suggest from the mission ofthe military and the virtues appropriate to that mis-sion. The list could easily be extended by consideringother aspects of the military's mission and other vir-tues appropriate to it-including perhaps the tradi-tional virtues of loyalty, courage, honor, and so on.

Any code will be general and exceptions to it maybe necessary. Let me therefore emphasize that despitethe importance of a code, no code, even as it acts as aguide, should be accepted and foliowed uncritically.For a code, being a set of general commands, has thestatus of any other command, and is limited by theconsiderations we have already seen.

Finally, why develop a code? There are some ad-vantages to developing and having a code of ethics forofficers. First, the very exercise of developing one isin itself worthwhile; it forces a large number of peo-ple within the military to think through in a fresh waytheir mission and the important obligations they as agroup and as individuals have with respect to societyas a whole. I have already suggested that, in the con-text of possible nuclear war, the mission of themilitary has changed significantly. Direct moral at-tention should be given to these changes. Secondly,once adopted, such a code could generate continuingdiscussion and possible modification by officers

A Code of Ethics for Off ers 29

throughout the armed services. This would be helpfuland worthwhile. Third, it could be used to help in-culcate into new officers the perspective of respon-sibility, the need to think about their actions morally,and the importance of developing the virtues ap-propriate to their positions. Fourth, a code could beused as a document to which members of the militaryand the military as a whole could point when asked todo something contrary to it. Fifth, a code could beused to provide guidelines for reevaluating the UCMJand other codes or statements. Sixth, it might be usedto reassure the citizens of the country that the militaryappreciates the trust placed in it and that it has takenappropriate steps to justify that trust. Finally, a codecould be used by the citizens as a touchstone againstwhich to judge whether the military was living up toits obligations.

All this can be accomplished by developing anEthical Code for Officers. Such a code can bedeveloped whether or not the military is considered aprofession. If it were a profession additional claimsmight be made for the code and it might have addi-tional components. But I have tried to spell out atleast in part how an appropriate and useful code canand should be developed whether or not the militaryis a profession. Regardless of this, the military and itsofficers have serious obligations that are betterspelled out and defended than either assumed or ig-nored. Any code will have defects, will be open tomisuse, and might be construed as self-serving. But ifproperly and conscientiously constructed, it will pro-duce more good than harm. And that in itself is suffi-cient justification for developing an Ethical Code forOfficers.

prt

MILITARYLEADERSHIP

James B. Stockd ue

MACHIAVELLI, MANAGEMENT,AND MORAL LEADERSHIP

EXTORTION, the squeeze-play drawing outof victims by force or compulsion is dramatized inGodfather movies as an easily recognized, explicit,usually illegal way of conducting business. In reality,though, it is conducted much more frequently insubtler ways-ways which are both more difficult torecognize and more difficult to deal with. And by nomeans are these ways illegal, at least not in the sensethat I use the word. We frequently face extortionarypressures in our everyday life, for extortion is just aconcentrated form of manipulation through the useof fear and guilt. We who are in hierarchies-be theyacademic, business, military, or some other sort-arealways in positions in which people are trying tomanipulate us, to get moral leverage on us. It is the

Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale, US Navy (Ret.), hasdistinguished himself as a pilot, air wing commander,Naval War College President, author, and a VietnamPOW. He is now at the Hoover Institution in California.This essay is reprinted from Proceedings with permission.Copyright © (1980) US Naval Institute. This article has alsobeen reprinted in the US Air Force Academy Journal ofProfessional Military Ethics, August 1982.

B3

______ AIl

34 Jwmes B. Stockale

wise leader who comes to the conclusion that he can'tbe had if he can't be made to feel guilty. That is astrue today in a free environment as it was for me dur-ing my years in prison camp. You have got to keepyourself clean-never do or say anything of whichyou can be made to be ashamed - in order to avoidbeing manipulated.

A smart man, an ethical man, never gives amanipulator an even break. He is always prepared toquench the extortionist's artful insinuation of guiltwith the icewater of a truthful, clear-conscienced put-down. The more benign the environment, the moreinsidious is the extortionist's style. "Then Arthurlearned," says the legend, "as all leaders are aston-ished to learn, that peace, not war, is the destroyer ofmen; that tranquility, rather than danger, is themother of cowardice; and that not need, but plenty,brings apprehension and unease."

This is not to suggest that there is only one wayto lead, one manner of leadership, one style that bestfits all circumstances. Of course not. I have merelysaid that all styles must be built on moral virtue. Onspecific leadership styles, I learned much from a talkby a psychoanalyst named Michael Maccoby. With acomprehensive understanding of American history,and after in-depth interviews of more than 200American leaders of the 1970s, Maccoby concludedthat there were four dominant leadership styles in theAmerican past.

Now there are two things to remember as Iquickly go over this analysis of Maccoby's. First ofall, examples of men who embody each style havealways been around and are still around; it's just thatthe challenges of different historic periods seemed todraw out particular types of leaders. And second,

Machiavel Manarengnt, and Moral Leadership 35

don't look for progress in leadership styles as we walkthrough this analysis. The leaders as leaders or as mendon't get better as we follow the historic process.

From the Declaration of Independence until thecredit system started to grow in the 1 870s after theCivil War, most American leaders fell into a categoryhe calls "craftsmen." They were "do-it-yourself" guys:self-reliant, strong-willed, cautious, suspicious,harder on themselves than they are on others. Ben-jamin Franklin was cited as their prototype then,Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn now. Their target of competi-tion was not other men, but rather their idea of theirown potential. Craftsmen climbed ladders not to getahead of others, but to achieve that level of excellencethey believed they had within themselves. They aremountain climbers, not players of what systemsanalysts call "zero-sum games." They liked to makeup their own minds; they did not buy school solu-tions. Craftsmen were men of conscience.

The industrial revolution and the need of itsnecessary credit and banking base were met by a newbreed of leaders: Maccoby called them the "junglefighters." Jungle fighters played "zero-sum games"with gusto; there was just so much business out thereand these were the men who knew how to stake outterritory and get it. Andrew Carnegie, the steelmagnate, was the prototype. Like craftsmen, junglefighters were also men of conscience. Although theycould sit at the board of directors' table andfiguratively decapitate incompetents with aplomb,they grieved. Characteristically they did not dodgeissues; they settled scores eyeball to eyeball, tastingnot only the self-satisfaction of authority but also theagony of pity.

36S James A. Stockdak

After World War 1, as the giant businesses thejungle fighters had built became bureaucracies, andas "public relations" grew into an everyday nationalpreoccupation, those jungle fighters were graduallydisplaced by the smoother "organization men," Likethe jungle fighters, the organization men were pater-nalistic and authoritarian. But unlike those pioneersof industry and finance who were motivated primarilyby competitive zeal, "organization men," ourpsychoanalyst believes, were more motivated by afear of failure. They were, nevertheless, characteris-tically honest; they were cautious men of conscience.They looked men in the eye when they fired them.They were "men of the heart," possessing qualitieswith an emotional content: a sense of commitment,loyalty, humor, and spontaneity.

In the early 1960s, a fourth style emerged to takethe prominent leadership role. Maccoby identifiespractitioners of this style as "the gamesmen." Thegamesmen, impatient under the yoke of their pater-nalistic and authoritarian bosses, and educated moreoften than not in game-theory-oriented businessschools, turned over a new page in leadership prac-tices. The gamesmen believe that if one properlyanalyzes the "game" of life, the "game" of manage-ment, the "game" of leadership, one sees that it is notnecessary to frame the problem as a "zero-sumgame." Rather, in their minds, American life can beanalyzed as a "game" in which any number can playand win.

These gamesmen were relaxed, objective, open-minded, detached, cerebral swingers. Such emotionalbaggage as commitment or conscience they deemedinefficient and unnecessary. "Play our cards rational-ly to wn and goto bedand sleep like ababy without

MachlaveU4 Management, and Moral Leadership 37

remorse. " Some bothered with love and families;many gave them a tentative try and quit when theyfound them too burdensome. Maccoby said that therewas a theatrical production that typified the leadersof each of these four ages and that the drama of thegamesmen was portrayed in the movie "The Sting."Your might remember that screenplay; in it, fair,competitive cooperative swingers, with the aid ofteamwork and technology, destroyed the hungup,authoritarian "Godfather."

The gamesmen, concluded psychoanalyst Mac-coby, were basically "men of the head": cool intellec-tual types, walking calculating machines. "Men of thehead" do many things well, but often have troublecoping with unpleasantness. These self-confident,cool, flexible men don't like to discipline people, theydon't like to look people in the eye when they firethem. Moreover, they often crave to be loved, andthat is a great leadership weakness. True leaders mustbe willing to stake out territory and identify anddeclare enemies. They must be fair and they may becompassionate, but they cannot be addicted to beingloved by everybody. The man who has to be loved isan extortionist's dream. That man will do anything toavoid face-to-face unpleasantness; often he will sellhis soul for praise'. He can be had.

It was in the heyday of these gamesmen thatsome of their number, the cool, glib, analytical,cerebral so-called defense intellectuals took charge ofthe Pentagon under the direction of Robert StrangeMcNamara. At that juncture, I was fortunate enoughto take a two-year sabbatical from military service forstudy at Stanford University. It was there that Istarted asking myself what truly rules the world: sen-timent, efficiency, honor, justice?

38 Jame B. Stockdek

The educated man, particularly the educatedleader, copes with the fact that life is not fair. Theproblem for education is not to teach people how todeal with success but how to deal with failure. Andthe way to deal with failure is not to invent scapegoatsor to lash out at your followers. Moreover, a properlyeducated leader, especially when harassed and underpressure, will know from his study of history and theclassics that circumstances very much like those he isencountering have occurred from time to time on thisearth since the beginning of history. He will avoid theself-indulgent error of seeing himself in a predicamentso unprecedented, so unique, as to justify his makingan exception to law, custom, or morality in favor ofhimself. The making of such exceptions has been thetheme of public life throughout much of ourlifetimes. For 20 years, we've been surrounded bygamesmen unable to cope with the wisdom of theages. They make exceptions to law and custom infavor of themselves because they choose to view or-dinary dilemmas as unprecedented crises.

Of course, it has been generally toward the aboveissue that I directed a course at the Naval War Col-lege. My formula for attacking this problem-both atthe War College and in my present assignment at TheCitadel-is the assignment of enough hard-corephilosophy (the Book of Job, the Socratic dialoguesof Plato, some of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics,Epictetus' Enchiridion, enough of Immanuel Kant tounderstand his concept of duty) and the reading ofenough high-quality ultimate situation literature(Fyodor Dostoyevsky's House of the Dead, AlbertCamus' Plague, Joseph Conrad's Typhoon, and Her-man Melville's Billy Budd) as to deter self-pity whenin extremis. With philosophy as the parent discipline,

Afedievd, Aegwu.t ad hMd LeadffAba i9

a discussion of courage might be focused on thewriter who most thoroughly treated it, Aristotle. Thismight lead to the question of the validity of his view-point that courage is impossible in the absence offear, that courage might be defined as a measure ofhow well one handles fear. How about the relation-ship between fear and imagination? Conrad has oneof his characters state that imagination is the motherof fear. Must not a leader have imagination? If thatbreeds fear, might that not sap his courage? He surelymust have courage above all ese... etc. From suchreadings and discussions come unertnig andclarifications of those elements of leadership whichserved in antiquity and those which must serve now.

Leadership must be based on goodwill. Goodwilldoes not mean posturing and, least of all, panderingto the mob. It means obvious and wholehearted com-mitment to helping followers. We are tired of leaderswe fear, tired of leaders we love, and most tired ofleaders who let us take liberties with them. What weneed for leaders are men of the heart who are sohelpful that they, in effect, do away with the need oftheir jobs. But leaders like that are never out of a job,never out of followers. Strange as it sounds, greatleaders gain authority by giving it away.

I am firmly convinced that the time I spent atStanford has been a major force in molding my ownpersonality as a leader. And I am just as firmly con-vinced that education in the classics and in the prin-ciples of human relationships gave me far betterpreparation for being a prisoner of war than did thetraditional survival and evasion training. My ideason the art of moral leadership received their most

40 James . Stackdale

profound testing in the stress and degradation -yes,

in the extortion environment -of a Communistprisoner of war camp.

The intensity and stark drama of my eight yearsin North Vietnam provided a quantity and range ofleadership challenge that would more than fill an or-dinary lifetime. In mere months or weeks, men madeand destroyed their reputations. Those behind barsseemed to be scanning reams of data on the problemsof good and evil in fast time. The extortion system,powered by our enemy's willingness to torture and im-pose isolation, quickly drove to the surface issues ofmoral integrity which at the pace of normal life couldtake years to foster and erupt into public view.

For united resistance, men had to get on quicklywith the business of assimilating knowledge of thecharacter traits of their fellow prisoners. Thisknowledge had to be more penetrating and morecalculating than the sort commonly found sufficientfor amicable social life out here in freedom. Is thenewcomer emotionally stable? (We had to make agood guess as to whether he had the steadfastness andcomposure to warrant being trusted with secretmaterial in that torture environment.) Does he havemoral integrity? In the privacy of the torture room,will he go to the wall in silence, or do what is so com-monplace in the business world nowadays and try tomake a deal? Is he sophisticated enough to avoid fall-ing for the interrogator's bait? Will he work his wayout on a limb by "gabbing" after that clever inter-rogator has dangled before him such American-lifeenticements as: Let us reason together; You are apragmatic people, meet us halfway?

In the extortion environment one can always bet-ter his own position at the expense of his fellows by

Machivei, ManAWment, and Mord L adffhp 41

holding still for the manipulator's setting up of subtlecompromises. A loner makes out by making acknowl-edged or tacit deals. This will never do. The intensityof life in jail clearly illuminated for us prisoners ofwar the truth that for the greatest good for thegreatest number of us, for our maximum happiness,maximum self-respect, maximum protection of oneanother, each of us had to submerge our individualsurvival instincts into an ideal of universal solidarity."No deals" and "Unity over self" became our mottos.

Some of you are doubtless skeptical of the prac-ticability of such ideals which seem to ask more of aman than human nature might be thought to allow.To the skeptics let me say right off that when there isleadership by example, and when there is a commonlyshared threat of total estrangement and humiliation,united magnanimous behavior can become a reality.When a man looks at the bottom of the barrelthrough creeping and growing fissures in the thinveneer of civilization that coats his existence, he sud-denly realizes that his slip back into barbarism couldcome about in weeks. As he peers over the edge of hisworld, it dawns on him how lonesome and terrible itwould be down there without communication,friends, or common cultural ties. He vividly realizeshow men, fellow countrymen, need one another forunderstanding and for sanity. As he sees himselfclinging to a receding civilization with his fingernails,it becomes clear to him that "No deals" and "Unityover self" are not goody-goody idealistic slogans;rather they are practical guides to action.

We saw that we had to build and tend our owncivilization if we were to keep ourselves from becom-ing animals. A man must relate to a community, acommonality of communication style, a commonality

42 lamae A. Sfeckdal

of ritual, of laws, of traditions, of poetry, of shareddreams, if he is to prevail, if he is to resist. "Man doesnot live by bread alone." Learning the truth and fullmeaning of that biblical adage was lesson one for usin that crucible of pressure. It goes without sayingthat the first job of leadership is to provide the com-munication necessary for that civilization, that ritual,those laws, those traditions.

The problem was to improvise a communicationssystem for a prison camp in which everybody lived insolitary confinement, a solitary confinement insilence, a solitary confinement in which the use of tor-ture was considered just punishment for those whobreak that silence to communicate with their fellows.Our Vietnam enemies gave us two ways to go on this.We could lie low and not communicate and go to seedover the years of silence and solitude. (One starts"looking for a friend" after a couple of years.) Or wecould communicate as a matter of duty and take ourlumps. Since the dictates of conscience and moralitymade the latter the only way to go, the problembecame how to communicate stealthily. For us,trapped in isolation in Hanoi, the means for thatcommunication was a tap code that would breakthrough the walls of solitary confinement, the wallsof silence. (For the mechanics of the code, I suggestreading Commander Everett Alvarez's "Sound: APOW's Weapon," pages 91-93 in the August 1976Proceedings.)

Leadership basics are vividly Portrayed in theprison camp example. Prison serves as a useful "testbed" (to use a test pilot expression) in which to studyin detail man's behavior under stress, stress of the sortunder which many of life's crucial decisions arenecessarily made. Mark this down in your book as

Madhd.veAl Mananent, and MoraTLea.dership 43

lesson two: In the high-stress situation, "status" willnot carry you as a leader. That is to say, you have tohave more going for you than your title, your seniori-ty, your position in your hierarchy, your rank. Youcannot get by with performing like a quarterback whois functional only while being protected "in thepocket," you've got to be able to scramble and im-provise, on your feet, and alone. Even this assumesthat by the time the pressure is on, you would haveearned your followers' respect, and not just their fearor friendship. Unless people respect you as a leader,when the fat is in the fire they'll just listen to yourorders and calmly walk away.

Lesson three: under stress, ordinary "transac-tional" leadership will never cut it. That is to say,transactional leadership propelled simply by the ef-fect of give and take, leadership driven by the base in-stincts of the marketplace and bargaining tablewhereby the leader makes an accommodation in theexpectation that his followers will make a com-plementary accommodation, simply will not standup. This may come as news to you because the "trans-actional" leader/follower relationship is so much apart of our way of doing business in everydayeconomic, social, even academic life. But what to usis the ordinary dance of life, the dance propelled bycontinuous compromise, finds itself flounderingunder pressure. Inputs are needed from "trans-forming" leaders. Transforming leaders don't simplyanalyze what they think their people want and thentry to give them part of it and hope they will receive acounter-accommodation in return. Transformingleaders instruct and inspire their followers torecognize worthy needs, and they make those needstheir wants. They have a way of raising their followers

44 Jams A. Steckdeae

out of their everyday selves and into their betterselves, of making them conscious of the high-mindedgoals that lie unconscious beneath their self-centereddesires. In summary, the transforming leader has thewisdom to read the minds of his flock, to understandwhat they want, to know what they ought to want,and he has the persuasive power to implant the latterinto their hearts.

In all that I have been saying, I've made thepoints that leaders under pressure must keepthemselves absolutely clean morally (the relativism ofthe social sciences will never do). They must lead byexample, must be able to implant high-mindedness intheir followers, must have competence beyond status,and must have earned their followers' respect bydemonstrating integrity. What I've been describing asthe necessary leadership attributes under pressure arethe bedrock virtues all successful leaders mustpossess, "under pressure and otherwise." Prison wasjust the "test bed," just the meatgrinder that vividly il-luminated these prime building blocks for me.

RQger L. Shinn

ETHICAL ASPECTS OF THEEXERCISE OF COMMAND

I COME TO You as an old soldier who hasobeyed many commands and grumbled about quite afew, as a wartime company commander who issuedmany commands, some effective and some futile, andas a scholar and teacher who for 25 years has workedin the field of social ethics, trying to learn what theprocesses of our society do to people.

I am aware of the many worlds of experience thatmeet. In fact, each of us individually is a meetingground of differing worlds of experience. One of mystudents this past year impressed me with the way inwhich worlds can interact in one person. He was anofficer in the United States Army, sensitive to thevalues and loyalties of the military world. He was achaplain, an ordained clergyman, with commitmentsto his church and its faith. He was a candidate for the

Dr. Shinn, retired, Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Chris-tian Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, New York,was an infantry officer in Europe in World War HI. Thisessay given at Ft. Meyer, Virginia, 26 July 1973, waspublished in the Military Chaplain's Review, Winter 1974,and reprinted in the US Air Force Academy Journal ofProfessional Military Ethics, December 1982.

45

46 Roger L. Shinn

degree of Doctor of Education, alert to the demandsof the world of scholarship. And he was a black man,sharing the aspirations and anger of his racial groupat this particular time in history. Thus he, a rare andthoughtful human being, found in himself these fourworlds of experience each with its prestige systems, itsgoals, its carefully cultivated symbols. The act thatearned him status in one world could cost him statusin another. So he had to ask himself: was he anauthority figure or a rebel, a man ambitious to rise inan establishment or a challenger of all establish-ments? Because he was such a questioner, he was abetter human being.

We here find out identities in many com-munities. We look for app. )val to varied referencegroups. We laugh at different jokes, out spines tingleto diverse music, and we become angry over con-trasting types of sacrilege. We may know the worldsof the military, of political leadership, of diplomacy,of business, of church and synagogut;- of highereducation, of racial heritage, of sexual identification.

These worlds of experience are also worlds ofdiscourse, with differing vocabularies. Bulls andbears on the prairies and in the forests are not thesame as bulls and bears on Wall Street. Plumbersmean one thing in my kitchen, something else in na-tional politics. Laundering has a clear meaning athome, another meaning in financing electoral cam-paigns. The word "gay" has quite different meaningsin different communities. Long hair and a shaggybeard are a way of say "I belong" in some worlds and"I don't belong and don't want to belong" in otherworlds.

So communication is difficult at the interfacebetween different worlds of discourse. What I say will

Ethical Asets of the Exercis of Command 47

come through differently to different hearers. Butprecisely at these interfaces communication may berewarding. I welcome the opportunity to try. And Iexpect that the most challenging questions you askwill be the ones from which I learn most.

I. The topic is "Ethical Aspects of the Exercise ofCommand." I begin by describing three paradoxesthat I find in the nature of military command. Theyare there because life, seen honestly, is paradoxical.Conflicting values are part of human experience, andthey pull us in opposing directions.

The first paradox comes out of the relation ofcommand to the American ethos and experience. Insome societies the basic idea of command raises noethical problems, because people assume that God ornature made some people to command and others toobey. The American Heritage, which is related to thebiblical heritage, does not. At the birth of our coun-try the Founding Fathers said: "We hold these truthsto be self-evident, that all men are created equal, thatthey are endowed by their Creator with certain un-alienable Rights. . . ." Thomas Jefferson, JohnAdams, Benjamin Franklin, and their co-signersknew that people are not equal in athletic ability, in-telligence, or governmental skills. They meant thatpeople are equal in human dignity, in basic rights andresponsibilities.

If that is the case, what is the justification ofcommand? Why should any human being have amoral right to command another human being? Toclaim such a right is to assume a heavy burden ofproof.

48 Roger L. Shinn

Yet life often requires that we accept that burdenof proof-nowhere more obviously than in combatsituations. Events require decisions - prompt deci-sions. The success of a mission and human lives are atstake. There is no time to call an assembly and worktoward a consensus, to appoint a committee that willreport next year, to consult legal counsel, to developan encounter group. Authority must be located-preferably in the best person, certainly in a persontrained and designated for that kind of decision-making.

So the exercise of command is justifiable. I sup-pose it is inherent in governmental processes, butespecially conspicuous in military organizations. Yetit is ethically paradoxical, and it always requires theeffort of justification.

I remember confronting the issue in my firstweek of basic training at Camp Wolters, Texas, in1941. The platoon sergeant, a regular Army man, wasexplaining to his fresh trainees the importance of obe-dience to orders. After all, he said, we were not ex-ceptional in having to take orders. The NCO's tookorders from the company officers, who took ordersfrom battalion officers, and so up the line to theCommanding General of the Division. And he tookorders through a chain of command that went to theChief of Staff in Washington. And he took ordersfrom the Commander in Chief, the President. "And,"the sergeant wound up, "who do you suppose theCommander in Chief takes orders from? From you,the voters!" That, I found, was no comfort when Iwas ordered to do Sunday guard duty. But it was animportant evidence of the weight our system ofgovernment attaches to mutual responsibility.

Ethical Aspects of the ExerCise of Command 49

I thought about that responsibility often. Ithought about it when I was commissioned andbecame a platoon leader. I rather like the title of pla-toon leader. When I became a company commanderthe designation was more perplexing. That anybodysbould be labeled a commander of other people raisedall the perplexities that have haunted Western civiliza-tion from the times of the Hebrew prophets andPlato. I understood the necessity and the rationale. Ihope I never forgot that the exercise of command in-volves an immense burden of responsibility and thepossibilities of terrible abuse.

The second ethical perplexity of command has todo specifically with military command and the wholemorality of war. War is, at best, a tragic necessity-an answer to aggression and oppression. It is, atworst, mankind's most cruel and destructive activity.

The message of the horrors of war and the goodof peace comes, not only from pacifists, but from theheart of the military establishment. The Strategic AirCommand has chosen the motto: "Peace is our pro-fession." At the entrance to the Carlisle Barracks, justunder the words, "Army War College," is the quota-tion, "Not to promote war, but to preserve peace,"from "Elihu Root, Founder."' General Eisenhower,thinking about nuclear war as President of the UnitedStates, said in 1960: "War is now utterly prepos-terous." 2 General Bradley described war as "a wretch-ed debasement of all the thin pretensions of civiliza-tion." 3 General Patton, the most aggressive of allgenerals in World War II, nevertheless saw the moraland religious paradoxes of his role. On his first Sun-day in Normandy, he had reported: "I went to aCatholic Field Mass where all of us were armed. Aswe knelt in the mud in the slight drizzle, we could

59 Roger L. Shinn.

distinctly hear the roar of the guns, and the whole skywas filled with airplanes on their missions of destruc-tion .. , quite at variance with the teachings of thereligion we were practicing."'

Like many of you, I have lived with this perplexi-ty. I have believed it my conscientious duty to enterinto war for the sake of justice and peace. In a worldwhere hard ethical decisions involve conflicts ofvalues, the military commander is not uniquely in-volvedi in such conflicts, but he is more openly in-volved than most people. And he stands peculiarly ina situation of temptation. Often the incentives thatinfluence people generally -professional advance-ment, public acclaim, the approval of peers - are inhis case related to achievement in war. The tempta-tions are great to forget that the ultimate mission ofthe military is "not to promote war, but to preservepeace.

The third ethical paradox arises out of thecultural situation in which our generation lives -throughout most of the world and quite specifically inthis nation. It is a confused cultural situation withdeep disagreements about important human goals.We live in a world that is restive under authority, aworld that distrusts concentrated power. An "anti-establishment" mood marks many societies and in-filtrates even the most authoritarian societies-even,for example, the Soviet society. Centralized lineorganizations are not in style. Free-floating,charismatic authority rather than fixed hierarchicalauthority appeals to many people. Various groups-conspicuously youth, black people, women, poorpeople, those at the bottom of the status ladder-aresaying: "Nobody is going to tell us what to do. Wewant to make the decisions that affect our destiny."

Ethica Aspect: of the Exercise of Command 51

Such claims sometimes have a rhetorical excess.Nobody makes all the decisions that affect his owndestiny. All people live with some restraints, as well assome opportunities, defined by society. But somepeople have suffered many restraints and few oppor-tunities. So it is not only a contemporary style butalso a profound ethical demand that they be heard.The professional leaders of the "new Army" are strug-gling with hard decisions these days: how can we in-crease the freedom and dignity of the soldier, what ofthe old style is "Mickey Mouse" and what is essential,what is the right combination of relaxed and per.missive life styles with traditional disciplines?

Although nobody knows for certain the answers,the questions themselves are evidence of the perplexi-ty our entire society faces. Although I live chiefly in,and share the values of, the world of higher educa-tion -where protest movements, freedom, and spon-taneity have been the recent vogue - I have some ap-preciation of the values of the military system. I thinkof two examples.

The first is the racial desegregation of the Army.Like the rest of American society, the Army waitedtoo long to desegregate. But when it moved it movedfaster and more effectively than most social institu-tions -often shaming business, public schools, andchurches in the process. There is not the slightest doubtthat the processes of command and discipline deservemuch of the credit. The current racial problems in thearmed services are evidence that command and disci-pline have limited effects and that the contagiousdiseases of our society cannot be banned frommilitary life by edict. But the creative uses of com-mand have served the purposes of democracy in thedesegregation of the Army.

52 Roger L. Shinn

The second example comes from the experienceof prisoners of war. I can barely imagine the ordeal ofthose soldiers and airmen who fought in what GeneralMaxwell Taylor has called "the dirtiest, most unpleas-ant and least glorious war in our history," who thensuffered the painful physical and psychic experiencesof imprisonment. 5 It is to be expected that thewounds of those experiences will not quickly heal. Yetthe strength of those men has impressed many people,even among those totally opposed to the war in whichthey fought. As Newsweek columnist Shana Alex-ander has put it, "these POW's now appear to us toembody precisely those moral qualities of honor,patriotism, discipline and purpose which many of usfeel have largely disappeared from American life." 6

From my own far shorter and far less cruel experi-ences as a prisoner of war, I can testify to the valuesof the military system of command.

It is not the system for organizing a university, acongress, or a church. The old system is not exactlythe system for the future. The military system facesthe perplexity of revising its methods to meet achanged cultural situation. And the whole culturefaces the perplexity of relating some of its traditionalvalues to the values getting more obvious expressiontoday.

11. I have described three ethical perplexities orparadoxes that I see in the exercise of military com-mand. These will be with us for a while to come. Iexpect no instant solutions, least of all at this meet-ing. But I think I see better and worse ways ofmeeting these perplexities. To understand them wemust look at one curious characteristic of systems of

Ethica Asp~cts of the EwcLv of Command 53

command - to some extent of all systems of com-mand, but most especially of command systemswithin a democratic society.

Put it this way: a command is compulsory, yet itseffectiveness does not depend solely on compulsion.Take the first part of that statement. A command isby its very nature compulsory. It does not begin,"Everybody who feels like it, come along." A com-mand is not a question, a suggestion, a hint, an invita-tion, an entreaty. It is a command, and there arepenalties for non-compliance. But take the secondpart of the statement. The effectiveness of a com-mand does not depend solely on compulsion. Itdepends also on morale. General Eisenhower in hisCrusade in Europe wrote: "Morale is the greatestsingle factor in successful war.... In any long andbitter campaign morale will suffer unless all ranksthoroughly believe that their commanders are con-cerned first and always with the welfare of the troopswho do the fighting."17 That tells a lot about thenature of command.

Let me reminisce. During the last phases of pre-combat training for World War 11, the Ninth Ar-mored Division had a rule that no soldier should beseparated from his weapon during training. TheCommanding General inspected my company duringa lunch break in the field. The company was deployedin such a way that I did not see the next event. Onesoldier had laid aside his rifle while filling his messkit,and the general told his aide to pick it up. That nightI - not the soldier but I - had to report to DivisionHeadquarters to recover the weapon and take a dress-ing down from the Commanding General. GeneralJohn Leonard and I both came from Toledo, Ohio,but we never realized that until after the war, and in

54 Roer. L. Shin,

any case it would not have done me the slightest bit ofgood. I returned to the company with the rifle - andwith my ears smarting. I had been told, once again,that it was my duty to enforce discipline. I understoodthe system. But, licking my wounds, I refreshed mymemory again on the definition of discipline in thebasic infantry field manual: "cheerful willing obe-dience to the command of a superior. I knew thatthere was no discipline without enforcement, but Iknew also that no force could compel that obediencebe cheerful and willing. Effective command cannotsimply be compelled; it must be evoked, won, earned.

I want to mention three ethical qualities of com-mand that have something to do with the winning ofdiscipline. The first is fairness. There must be nofavoritism. Inevitably a commanding officer likessome of his subordinates better than others-and hiswife likes some of their wives better than others.Probably he likes some of their wives better thanothers. That does not give him the right to assign thedangerous and unpleasant missions to those he likesleast. His commands must be just; they may be strict,but they cannot be a matter of whim.

Most important of all, he avoids favoritism notonly among his subordinates but also towards himself.He does not spare himself. He does not issue ordersout of his emotional frustrations. He does not takedelight in demonstrating his authority. He does not useothers for the sake of his ambitions. He matches andseeks to surpass whatever loyalty he demands.

A second quality of command is courage. Every-body knows that soldiers are expected to havecourage and that they expect their commanders tohave courage. Not everyone thinks through the kindsof courage that life demands. The person con-spicuous for one kind of courage may lack another.

Ethica Aspects of the Exerlge of Commend 55

A society like ours puts a high value on stabilityand the achievements of a civilization that has over-come some of the risks that are common to humanlife elsewhere. We don't expect tigers to pounce on us,bad weather to drive us to starvation, or enemytribesmen to kill us. Since life is usually lessprecarious than in most e~ast history, the demand forphysical courage in danger is less frequent. It istherefore the more admirable when men who love lifeconquer their fears and risk their lives for comradesand a cause.

There is another kind of courage equally impor-tant - the moral courage to resist pressures and take astand against immoral acts. Without pretending toknow the details, I think that GI Ronald Ridenhourmay have had it when he spilled the story of My Lai;or Airman Lonnie Franks when he disclosed GeneralLavelle's unauthorized bombings of North Vietnam;or Major Hal Knight when he told a Senator of thefalsification of records of secret bombings of Cam-bodia.' The man in a chain of command turns oversome of his rights of judgment; he must act on thejudgments of his superiors, even though his ownjudgment differs. What he cannot turn over toanybody else is his conscience and his integrity.

The last of the three qualities of command that Ihave chosen to emphasize, I can describe by means ofan anecdote. A few days after the cross-channel inva-sion of France in World War 11, General Marshallflew across the ocean for a conference with GeneralEisenhower and General Bradley. We are told thatthey went over the military situation, as commandersdo. Then, in a more relaxed way, they fell to talkingabout wai and military leadership. They talked abouthistoric commanders since Gideon. And they put up

56 Roger L. Shima

the question, what is the indispensable quality for theleader who must order other men to face death. Theanswer they agreed on came in one word provided byGeneral Marshall. The word was selflessness.

That word is surprising. We expect of com-manders a certain kind of self-assurance, a flair, anability to dramatize themselves, a capacity to projecta decisive image. What the three generals meant, Isuppose, was that the commander's concern for him-self and his status must be less than his concern forthe cause he upholds and the troops he commands,leads, and serves. I suggest another word that mayhelp to interpret their word. My word is responsi-bility.

Responsibility flows both upwards and down-wards in a hierarchy. The commander has a re-sponsibility to his superior officers, as they exercisetheir lawful duties. He has a responsibility to the Con-stitution of the United States.

As Hal Knight told a Senator in testimony oneweek in 1973, "Sir, I didn't take an oath to supportthe military. I took an oath to support the Constitu-tion." It is a responsibility to international laws ofwar. It is, for many of us, a responsibility to God.

If responsibility -and particularly accountabil-ity-is most obviously upwards, moral responsibilityalso reaches downwards. The commander has aresponsibility to those whom he commands. To forgetthis is to vitiate personal integrity and the ethicalvalidity of the system. In Lord Acton's famouswords, "All power tends to corrupt; absolute powercorrupts absolutely." I don't know how often thesedays you hear the old slogan, RHIP. Rank has itsprivileges. Those privileges are deserved only if rank

Ethical Aspcts of the EwLw of Command 57

has its responsibilities. As the Bible puts it, "Everyoneto whom much is given, of him will much be required;and of him to whom men commit much they will de-mand the more." (Luke 12:48)

There are commanders who understand that. In1944 Ernie Pyle filed a story from the bruising Italiancampaign. It was about the death of a company com-mander. 1, a company commander in training for bat-tle, read the story and aspired to be the kind of troopcommander that Ernie Pyle described. I want to sharepart of that dispatch.

Captain Henry T. Waskow was a company com-mander in the Thirty-sixth Division.... He was veryyoung, only in his middle twenties, but he carried in him asincerity and gentleness that made people want to beguided by him.

"After my father, he came next," a sergeant told me."He always looked after us," a soldier said. "Hed go

to bat for us every time.""I've never knowed him to do anything unfair,"

another said.I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they

brought Captain Waskow down. The moon was nearlyfull, and you could see far up the trail ... Dead men hadbeen coming down the mountain all evening, lashed ontothe backs of mules.

The Italian mule skinners were afraid to walk besidedead men, so Americans had to lead the mules down thatnight. Even the Americans were reluctant to unlash and liftoff the boies .... so an officer had to do it himself and

* ask others to help.I don't know who that first one was. You feel small in

the presence of dead men, and you don't ask silly ques-* tions.... They laid him on the ground in the shadow of

the low stone wall beside the road. We left him there besidethe road, that first one, and we all went back in the cow-

58 Rogg L. Shin'

shed.... We talked soldier talk for an hour or more; thedead man lay all alone, outside in the shadow of the wall.

Then a soldier came into the cowshed and said therewere some more bodies outside. We went out into theroad. Four mules stood there in the moonlight.... Thesoldiers who led them stood there waiting.

"This one is Captain Waskow," one of them saidquietly.

Two men unlashed his body from the mule and liftedit off and laid it in the shadow beside the stone wall. Othermen took the other bodies off. Finally, there were five ly-ing end to end in a long row. You don't cover up dead menin the combat zones. They just lie there in the shadows un-til somebody comes after them.

The unburdened mules moved off to their olive grove.The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave. They stoodaround, and gradually I could sense them moving, one byone, close to Captain Waskow's body. Not so much tolook, I think, as to say something in finality to him, and tothemselves. I stood close by and I could hear.

One soldier came and looked down, and he said outloud, "God damn it!"

That's all he said, and then he walked away.Another one came, and he said, "God damn it to hell

anyway!" He looked down for a few last moments andthen turned and left.

Another man came, I think he was an officer. It washard to tell officers from men in the dim light, foreverybody was bearded and grimy. The man looked downinto the dead captain's face and then spoke directly to him,as though he were alive. "I'm sorry, old man."

Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer andbent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in awhisper but awfully tenderly, and he said, "I sure amsorry, sir."

Then the first man squatted down, and he. ... tookthe captain's hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes

Ethical Aspects of the Exercds of Commnand 59

holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently intothe dead face. And he never uttered a sound all the time hesat there.

Finally he put the hand down. He reached over andgently straightened the points of the captain's shirt collar,and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of theuniform around the wound, and then he got up and walkedaway down the road in the moonlight, all alone.

The rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving thefive dead men lying in a line, end to end, in the shadow ofthe low stone wall. We lay down in the straw in the cow-shed, and pretty soon we were all asleep.'

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you CaptainWaskow as a soldier who understood the respon-sibilities of command.

NOTES

1. For a photograph of the motto, see Army, 22 (March1972): 56.

2. Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech in Rio de Janeiro, Feb.24, 1960. New York Times, February 25, 1960, p. 8.

3. Omar H. Bradley, A Soldier's Story (New York: HenryHolt and Company, 195 1), p. 311.

4. George S. Patton, War as I Knew It (New York:Pyramid Books, 1966, first published by Houghton Mif-flin Co., 1947), p. 94.

5. Maxwell D. Taylor, "Is an Army Career Still Worth-while," Army, 23 (February 1973): 10.6. Shana Alexander, "Prisoners of Peace," Newsweek, 51(March 5, 1973): 32.

7. DwIght D. Eismihowr, Chs In Ewvpe (GardenCity, NY: Doubleday A Co., Inc., 1948), p. 210.

8. Hal Knight, reported in New York Mhw, July 22, 1973,Section 4, p. 3.

9. Ernie Pyle, Brow Men (New York: Gromt and Dunlap,1945), pp. 106-107.

Manuel M. Davenport

ETHICS AND THEMILITARY ORGANIZATION

FOLLOWING JOHN LADD,' the term "for-mal organization" distinguishes social systems createdspecifically to pursue private and public purposesfrom those, such as families or nations, which existbecause certain individuals have united to pursuecommon purposes. A formal organization such as ourmilitary organization exists because it was created topursue a purpose of the nation, to defend it frompossible enemies. Because the military organization iscreated as a means to an end we, who have created it,tend to evaluate it, as well as other formal organiza-tions, in terms of its instrumental effectiveness. Fromthis tendency two consequences follow. Individualmembers of the military organization are viewed ascomponents to be retained if their behavior is consis-tent with the objectives of the organization and to bereplaced when it is not. Secondly, we find it all tooeasy to judge members of the military organization bynothing other than their effectiveness in realizing theobjectives of the orgaization.

This article was presented at the Fifth Joint Services Con-ference on Professional Ethics, National Defense Universi-ty, January 1983, and printed in the US Air ForceAcademy Journal of Professional Military Ethics, August1983.

61

62 Manuel M. Davenort

Ladd does not consider effectiveness in realizingobjectives an ethical standard at all because he doesnot believe that the alleged goodness of the conse-quences of any action can provide for it an ethicaljustification. Thus, he argues that formal organiza-tions inevitably present us with an ethical dilemma:We must choose between sacrificing the benefits theyprovide or we must sacrifice proper ethical standardsand, hence, our truly human nature. 2 Such a conclu-sion, however, begs the question by assuming withoutargument that none of the objectives of any formalorganization can be ethical and such question-beggingis made to seem justified by concentrating upon theobjectives of a formal organization as the sole deter-minant of their ethical nature.

Formal organizations do have objectives butwhether they are ethical or not is determined also bytheir structure, their personnel and the social environ-ment in which these factors interact. For purposes ofillustration let's consider, first, the case of a non-military formal organization, which for legal reasonswe shall call "the Ramsey Corporation."3 Founded in1905 to package and sell bulk chemicals, the RamseyCorporation gained national attention in 1922 bymarketing Zappo, a household drain cleaner compos-ed of sodium hydroxide, sodium nitrate, sodiumchloride and aluminum particles. As Martin Ramsey,the chemical engineer who devised the product, knew,Zappo, when added to water, generates heat as thealuminum particles dissolve in solution with sodiumhydroxide and as the hydrogen gas thereby formed isoxidized by the sodium nitrate. The heat generated,sufficient to rupture a closed container, dissolves fatand grease in clogged drains.

Ethics ad the Miltary Orguation 63

In 1959, Mrs. Taylor purchased a can of Zappoin Chicago. She removed it from the grocery sack andplaced it beside her clogged sink. As she reached toturn on the cold water faucet, the can exploded, burn-ing her face and destroying the sight of both eyes.Subsequently, she sued the Ramsey Corporation for$1.2 million.

In 1959, the president of Ramsey was MartinRamsey's son, Arthur, who was still committed to hisfather's objective, which was to develop new house-hold products and promote them by means of inten-sive national advertising. In 1959, over 50% ofAmerican families who used a drain cleaner usedZappo. Arthur Ramsey was trained in marketing andhis vice-president in charge of marketing and adver-tising was a college classmate with the same training.Other vice-presidents were also close friends of eitherArthur or his father and most of the corporation'sstock was held by the Ramsey family.

The corporation was structured into three majordivisions. Of these research and development wasdominant, marketing and advertising second in im-portance and manufacturing last. Quality control wasa subdivision that reported to research and develop-ment. All three divisions reported to Arthur Ramsey.

Cans of Zappo had exploded before but it wasnot until the late fifties, when large suits began to pileup, that the corporation began to consider qualitycontrol for the sake of consumer safety. Previouslyquality control was emphasized to guarantee that theproduct would be reliable, that when mixed withwater it could be counted on to generate sufficientheat to unclog drains. In the late fifties, however, thecourts began to enforce the legal doctrines of strictliability and breach of implied warranty and con-sumers were more willing to sue when injured.

'4 Mouw M. Dpea~wt

What probably caused the can that blinded Mrs.Taylor to explode was moisture that entered the canbecause of a screw-cap that was loose due to defectivecapping machines. After cans were capped they werespray-washed, at which time moisture could enter inan amount sufficient to cause corrosion, which wouldseal a loose cap but in time as it settled lower causeenough heat to burst the can along the seam. In anyevent, after the Taylor incident, the Ramsey Corpora-tion replaced the screw-cap, which could withstand 70p.s.i. of internal pressure, with a flip-top plastic capthat would blow at 15 p.s.i. and this required replac-ing the capping equipment.

Assuming for the moment that the objective ofthe Ramsey Corporation, to manufacture and marketnew household products, was proper, it should beclear that in the period from 1922 to the mid-fortiesthe personnel and structure of the corporation werewell suited to the realization of that objective. Topmanagement was in the hands of chemists andmarketing specialists who succeeded in developingproducts that were the first of their kind and whichcaptured and retained large market shares. Because itwas a family-held corporation the emphasis onresearch and marketing was not subject to distractionby stockholders in search of quicker profits. As ismade clear by the corporate structure, both qualitycontrol and manufacturing were subordinate toresearch and marketing.

During this same period the social environmentwas also compatible with the corporation's objective.Most consumers would not have even thought of su-ing anyone over a defective product and if they had,lawyers would have informed them that such a suitwould have to be filed within a fixed time after

Ethis and the MIlitaY Oranlzatle 65

purchase and would have to prove breach of statedwarranty plus deliberate negligence. But by the latefifties the social environment had changed and theRamsey Corporation failed to adjust. Investigation ofthe manufacturing process for Zappo, conductedafter the Taylor suit, revealed that no monitoring ofhumidity in the storage and mixing areas had ever ex-isted, that only the first few cans in a run of severalthousand were checked for moisture and only 10% ofthe capped cans were examined visually, more for ap-pearance than for defects. The message given bymanagement and the adiministrative structure thatquality control and manufacturing were relativelyunimportant had been well heeded by the plantworkers and their immediate supervisors.

Certainly to adjust to a new social environmentin which consumers demand safe products and thecourts encourage such demands the Ramsey Corpora-tion will have to make changes in both personnel andstructure in order to continue to realize its objective.Existing personnel can be changed not only byreplacement but also by retraining. The plant workersmust be trained to think in terms of possible harm toconsumers and their morale must be raised by a revi-sion in the structure of the corporation. Quality con-trol and manufacturing must be assigned in practiceimportance equal to research and marketing. Prob-ably Arthur Ramsey and his long-time associates aretoo closely wedded to the old structure to make thenecessary changes.

So far I have left aside two questions which arerelevant both to the case under discussion and thebroader issue of ethics and formal organizations. Isthe objective in itself ethical? Is it right, in this in-stance, to market a potentially explosive product

66 ManIl M. I).VeMMIr

which is certainly not necessary for human survivaland for which cheaper and safer substitutes like hotwater and kerosene are available? Secondly, we mustask: Are the changes in the social environment towhich formal organizations must adjust to realizetheir objectives in themselves right? Is it right, in thisparticular case, for cofisumers to expect products thatare both efficient and safe and for the courts to sup-port such expectations? Our answers to both ques-tions will depend ultimately upon the comparativevalues we assign to human freedom and security inour conception of justice.

The Zappo case, then, should illustrate ourearlier claim that the ethical nature of formalorganizations cannot be determined by evaluatingonly their objectives. At least five determinationsmust be made, two of which are external and three ofwhich are internal. We must determine, internally,whether the organization's personnel are the bestavailable to realize the organization's objectives,whether the organization's structure is appropriate toits personnel and the realization of its objectives andwhether the organization, given appropriate person-nel and structure, is making appropriate adjustmentsin its pursuit of objectives to the prevailing social en-vironment. Externally, we must determine whetherthe organization's objectives are ethical and whetherthe demands made upon the organization by thesocial environment are ethical.

To justify, and not merely illustrate, our claimthat the objectives of a formal organization are notthe sole determinant of its ethical nature we mustshow that formal organizations are capable of moralagency, that is, can make ethical responses to chang-ing situations, and show that the consideration of theconsequence of actions is ethically relevant.

Ethi and the MNta,' Orsanlwtion 6S7

As Kenneth Goodpaster has argued,' formalOrganizations are dynamic and can respond to exter-nal pressures. Thus, in theory, formal organizationscan follow or act in accord with even ethical prin-ciples. In practice, such a response is not ethical if it ismerely an adjustment necessary to realize a precon-ceived objective, but it can be an ethical response if itleads to a change which is, or is adopted because itpromises to be, an ethical improvement. On this view,to exercise moral agency, or to be morally responsi-ble, does require consideration of the consequencesof possible responses or actions. As Frankena putsit,' consideration of consequences is relevant but in-sufficient for moral responsibility. To argue, as doesLadd, that none of the objectives of a formalorganization can be ethical requires the assumptionthat the consideration of consequences is both insuf-ficient and unnecessary for moral responsibility. Suchan assumption clearly distinguishes between ethicaland expedient action, but it also isolates ethical actionfrom rational behavior.

As we turn, then, to consider the militaryorganization, we will determine whether it is ethicalor encourages ethical behavior by examining not onlyits objectives and the appropriateness of the meansutilized to achieve them but also its manner ofresponse to those ethical principles, if any, in itssocial environment. Most previous consideration ofthis question has assumed that the objectives of themilitary organization are ethical and has examinedonly the appropriateness of the means utilized. In amost provocative article published by the NDUPress,' Richard Gabriel examines the relation be-tween the structure and the objectives of the military

organization and concludes that the modern entre-

68 Maud M. Drnewpot

preneurial structure of the military is destroying thegroup cohesiveness necessary for combat effec-tiveness and that we must restore the pre-modermcommunal structure we so foolishly abandonedsomewhere between Korea and Vietnam.

If Gabriel is correct in two critical assumptions,that for the military to fight effectively in time of waris an ethical objective and that military leaders oughtto make efficient warriors out of whatever personnelsociety provides, 7 then the issue he raises is an ethicalissue and the military organization is morally respon-sible for not only a failure of objective but also forthe unethical actions its use of an inappropriate struc-ture encourages on the part of its personnel.

If I may expand upon Gabriel while relieving himof responsibility for what follows, I doubt very muchthat anyone ever joined the military in time of peacesolely because of love of country. Before Vietnam,during what Gabriel calls "the pre-modern" period,enlistees joined in quest for a home and the militarystructure then satisfied that desire. Once assigned to aunit your future friends, officers and duties weredetermined for years to come. If combat duty came,you fought for and because of your "buddies," a termthat now smells of mothballs. Now new enlistees andofficers join in search of skills that will serve them infuture civilian careers and the military structure ac-comodates them by treating them like trainees andjunior executives at IBM. To remain with one unit orone group of associates a year or longer is unusual. Ifcombat duty comes, it is one of those unpleasant as-signments but it, too, will not long endure. As an en-listed man, you try to stay alive until rotated. As an of-ficer, you may do the same unless you view combatassignment as an opportunity for career advancement.

EhiMs and the Military Orgnsladon 09

In which case you may try to meet production quotasestablished by like-minded superiors and, if clever,try to avoid being "fragged" by disgrunted subor-dinates.

I know from personal experience and the ex-amples of close kin what it means to find a home inthe Army, and I share with the DI in An Officer and aGentleman contempt for those who join merely to ac-quire skills valued by the business world, but I stillthink Gabriel is wrong in believing that the good olddays can be restored if the military structure willsimply "take human raw material, change it (and]mold it."$ To so conclude overlooks the fact that inthose good old days the military structure had themuch easier task of providing a home for those whoentered wanting a home. It also overlooks the factthat within any formal organization the interplay be-tween personnel and structure involves give and takebetween the motivations of individual members andthe techniques of initiation, which is illustrated in theworld of business today as junior members areresisting the entrepreneurial structure and itsdemands, are refusing to accept new assignments andlocations, and are causing the structure to bemodified accordingly. None of this, of course, shouldbe taken to indicate that Gabriel is wrong in hisnegative criticism; the structure of a business corpora-tion is not appropriate for the military organizationand it does encourage, by rewarding it, unethicalbehavior.

According to Gabriel, the major reason the mili-tary should reject the entrepreneurial structure is thatits objectives are in conflict with those proper for themilitary. 9 He assumes, in other words, that the struc-tures of formal organizations are "function-specific"

I

70 Manue M. Davenport

and that the entrepreneurial structure is appropriatefor its objectives. The only sense, however, in whichthe structure of any formal organization can befunction-specific is the sense in which some structuresmay be more instrumentally effective than others inrealizing certain objectives. But whether they aredepends more upon the personnel than upon thestructure itself. As we say in my world, a good teachercan teach well no matter how the learning situation isstructured although good teaching is easier given cer-tain structures.

We may seriously question, also, whether the en-trepreneurial structure is appropriate even for thebusiness world and its objectives. As it establishes ahierarchical order between top, middle and lowermanagement, it creates competition for the higherranks and tends to reward those who produce im-mediate profits. At the bottom of the same hierarchyis labor, in an adversarial relation to all of manage-ment, little concerned with corporate profits andmuch concerned with obtaining increases in wagesand/or benefits. What this structure and the motiva-tions it encourages have done to our own automobileand steel industries should indicate that a differentstructure, possibly one made in Japan, might be moreeffective even if all we seek is to maximize profits. Mypoint is that those unconvinced by Gabriel, who stillbelieve that the military should ape the objectives ofbusiness, should not rush headlong to the conclusionthat, therefore, they should imitate the organizationalstructures of business.

Now that I have revealed most of my ethical andorganizational biases, perhaps, my concludingevaluation of the ethical nature of the militaryorganization will be at least more clear if not more

Ethics and the Miliary Organiztion 71

persuasive. As I have argued elsewhere,' 0 the objec-tive of the military organization is to exercise andmanage violence to promote and preserve the safetyand welfare of the human species and to do so in-asmuch as possible in a manner consistent with the in-terests of the client-nation which sanctions this objec-tive and the dignity and status of those who carry itout. This objective I believe is ethical for two reasons.First, as Elizabeth Anscombe has argued,"I certainnecessary human values require the existence of astable, secure society and such a society cannot bemaintained unless some social agency is authorized torestrain those who would disrupt that society.Secondly, the social agency authorized to restraindisruptive behavior must be allowed to exerciseviolence if necessary because there are those who willnot cease their antisocial behavior unless deprived ofliberty or life. It is this second point that is mostcritical. A genuine pacifist, by which I mean to ex-clude part-time pacifists who oppose only particularwars, would object that the most effective way torestrain and eliminate antisocial behavior is by loveand would add that violence only gives rise to moreviolence. If we suppose, as genuine pacifists do, thatthere is in our universe a moral law at work which inthe long run rewards all love with its increase andpunishes all violence with greater violence, then themilitary objective is unethical. To protest that in thelong run we will all be dead is beside the point becausethe genuine pacifist believes that death is an illusion.

In answer to genuine pacifism, all that can besaid is that human experience weighs against itsmetaphysical assumptions and strongly supports themore pessimistic belief that some ultimate threats tobasic human values can be countered only by the use

72 Maun M. DavfnpMr

of violence. It should be obvious, however, that gen-uine pacifists do not constitute such threats and I seeno good reason for punishing them for their beliefs.

To complete our external evaluation of themilitary organization we must ask whether thedemands made upon it by the social environment areethical. Inasmuch as the civilian world demands ofthe military organization that it carry out its obliga-tion, as defined earlier, simple logic would require meto say that such a demand is ethical. It is when thecivilian world makes demands concerning the mannerin which this objective is to be carried out that ethicalconflicts arise. Two examples may be sufficient.

Since the Korean War many parents and politi-cians have been saying, in effect, that they want themilitary organization to carry out its objective butdon't use our children or the children of our sup-porters. Use instead the children of the poor, theuneducated and the disenfranchised. Quite apartfrom the harmful impact it has upon the effectivenessof the military organization, this demand is itselfunethical. If, as argued earlier, the military objectiveis legitimate as essential to preserving basic humanvalues, then to demand that it be pursued by thosealready deprived of such values is doubly wrongbecause, first, it denies the right of all persons to suchvalues and, secondly, by using those so deprived ofmeans to perpetuate the values of those served, itdenies the humanity of those so used.

The second closely related demand made by thecivilian world is that in carrying out its objective themilitary organization should do it anywhere buthere.' 2 of Course, testing and target ranges areneeded, missiles must be placed somewhere, basesmust be built and military personnel must be housed

ts ead th ML~tuy ftgaadmi 73

but don't spoil my view, threaten my daughters orlower my property values! This demand, too, is anunethical attempt to gain benefits at the expense ofothers and accounts for the general uneasiness manycivilians feel in the presence of military personnel. Itis much easier to use others if you are not reminded oftheir humanity.

By reference to these unethical social demands, Iwill consider next whether the military organization ismaking appropriate adjustments to the prevailingsocial environment and will argue that although it ismaking expedient adjustments, these adjustments areunethical. When politicians in response to pressurefrom constituents forced the military to depend uponvolunteers as personnel, the military response was,and has been, heroic and many officers almost suc-ceed in convincing themselves that it was their idea inthe first place. But heroic response to unethicaldemands does not make the response ethical. Accept-ance of and adjustment to this social demand is notonly unethical because it reinforces the society'sdenial of the rights and humanity of military person-nel and its refusal to accept its obligation to share inthe cost for preserving its values, but it is alsounethical because, as Sam Sarkesian suggests,' 3 itmakes increasingly difficult the process of trainingand utilizing personnel and perpetuates the separationof civilian and military values. By adjusting to the de-mand for an all-volunteer membership, the militaryorganization encourages the society to believe thatsociety's demand that preparedness for military ac-tion be conducted with no disturbance to civilians isalso legitimate. There is, I believe, a close relationshipbetween the military's expedient response to both ofthese demands and the attractiveness of push-button

74 Mwawl M. Davenport

warfare to civilians and the military alike, an attrac-tiveness that may prevent us from properly judginghigh-tech weaponry in terms of its military effec-tiveness or the capacity of military personnel to use it.What is even more sobering is that if these socialdemands increase because, in part, of the military'seasy accommodation, the military organization maywell be pushed into viewing the use of ultimateweapons as the only way to carry out its objectives.

Lest it be seen that by these comments I am ques-tioning civilian control of the military, allow me tosuggest that the very concept of civilian control wasintroduced in our nation to preserve democracy bypreventing the military profession from usurping thepowers of the state. As I have tried to argue, expe-dient accommodation to the social demands for anall-volunteer military organization and remote-control military operations is both underminingdemocracy and isolating the military profession fromproper civilian influence. For the sake of perpetuatingthe values for which civilian control of the militarywas once the intended means, military leaders mustresist these unethical social demands.

Perhaps I have made it sufficiently clear alreadythat I do not believe that the personnel available tothe military organization today are the best to realizeits objectives and that I believe that all able citizensshould share the military task of preserving our basicvalues. Short of a situation generally perceived to be anational emergency, it may be impossible to institutecompulsory military service which would provide per-sonnel better qualified and require that the militarytask be an equitable obligation. But even if such anideal is impossible, we have an ethical duty to pushtoward it as much as possible and to criticize present

Ethics wnd the MIlitary OrganIzation 75

methods of recruiting personnel which not only placean unjust burden of service on the socially deprivedbut an equally unjust burden of service upon thoseprofessionals in the military who are most conscien-tious. Military professionals responsible for trainingand devising training programs and for anticipatingpossible combat situations face even greater respon-sibilities, given inadquate personnel, and such respon-sibilities weigh most heavily upon those professionalsmost sincerely committed to the military objective,who are precisely those we cannot afford to losewhether by attrition or resignation.

Our final question is whether the militaryorganization's structure is appropriate to its personneland the realization of its objective. As argued earlier,the structure of a formal organization is not function-specific in the sense in which the selection of a struc-ture will determine without regard to personnel thatthe objective will be realized. As also indicatedearlier, this question can be considered in either idealor practical terms, that is, we may consider it in termsof ideal personnel and ideal structure or in terms ofactual personnel and actual structure. I have sug-gested that the actual personnel of the militaryorganization is inadequate because it does not repre-sent equitably all social classes, specifically, it over-represents the poor and uneducated. Thus, I havedescribed the actual personnel and the personnel whowould be more ideal.

What remains, then, is to describe the militaryorganization's actual and ideal structure. Viewed inthe abstract, its actual structure is, as Huntington hasdescribed it,14 bureaucratic and corporate. It servesits clients not on a one-to-one basis but as one collec-tive unit serving another collective unit. Within this

76 Manuel M. Davenport

bureaucratic structure assignments are determined byrank rather than by demonstrated ability. The struc-ture is corporate because it is bureaucratic. Militaryprofessionals have a sense of unity and separatenessfrom clients because they work together as a collectiveunit serving a collective whole rather than selectedindividuals.

Viewed in context, this structure varies accordingto the motivations of its personnel and its responsesto the social environment. The degree of variation,however, is limited by the abstract structure. Militaryofficers, as Gabriel says, may act from time to timelike junior IBM executives on the make, but betrayingthe Corps and betraying IBM are still quite differentactions, ethically and practically. The nation can sur-vive if IBM goes out of business and both the nationand IBM can survive if IBM's executives move toSperry-Rand. Military officers, as Gabriel wants, mayact from time to time like Jesuits training monasticinitiates, but serving God is not the same as servingcitizens who want peace and security. The restrainingof the enemies of God can await a final judgment andGod's militia does not depend upon Congressionalappropriations.

Because it is shaped by the needs of the clientsserved the abstract structure of the military organiza-tion is appropriate, at least in its broad outlines, to therealization of the military objective. But, in context,that is, given differing personnel and responses to thesociety served, that same structure can allow and evenencourage unethical behavior. For example, as men-tioned, because the military serves clients as one col-lective unit to another. military professionals areseparated from society. Thus, it is easier for such pro-

fessionals to give in to a social demand for greater

Ethis and the Military Orsanirtaton 77

remoteness in values and operations than to resist it.Because in the military assignments are determined byrank rather than demonstrated ability it is easier forofficers to aim at achieving rank and pleasing those ofsuperior rank rather than the realization of the mili-tary objective and to do so especially when most in-coming personnel have little reason to be concernedwith the needs of the client-state. Such behavior,however, would not be reduced by simply makingchanges in the abstract structure. Any such change,rather, would make more difficult the realization ofthe military objective, even given ideal personnel. Ifcitizens had to be consulted individually concerningthe conduct of military operations, Washingtonwould still be on the wrong side of the Delaware. Ifrespect for rank were to be replaced by respect forability, Patton would have invaded Austria and,assuming that ability can be recognized by those whodo not possess it, commanders would have to prefaceorders with a presentation of credentials.

If unethical behavior within the military organiza-tion is to be reduced, and here I summarize my in-tended thesis, the military organization must change itspersonnel and its responses to the social environmentso that within the existing structure there is a greatercommitment to the military objective. Personnel canbe changed by replacement or retraining. In the case ofthe military, retraining actual personnel cannot over-come the inequities created by the social demand foran all-volunteer force. That demand must be resistedand among recruits and officers alike there must be abroader cross-section of all social classes. Present andincoming officers must be made aware of the ethicaljustifications of the military objective. Political con-siderations change and social motivations fluctuate but

78 Manuel M. Davenpit

regardless of such variations the basic human values,such as family and home, gainful occupation and self-realization, require a society, the ultimate guarantorof whose security is the military profession. Unlessthis is accepted, no other reason for being a militaryofficer will provide the commitment necessary.

NOTES

1. John Ladd, "Morality and the Ideal of Rationality inFormal Organizations," in Ethical Issues in Business, ed.Thomas Donaldson and Patricia Werhane (Englewood,Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1979), 102-106.

2. Ibid., pp. 110-112.

3. This case is based on "The Ferdana Company,"prepared by Robert J. Dran (Boston: Intercollegiate CaseClearing House, 1972).

4. Kenneth Goodpaster, "Morality and Organizations," in

Ethical Issues in Business, pp. 117-118.

5. W.K. Frankena, Ethics (Prentice-Hall, 1973), Chap. 3.

6. Richard A. Gabriel, "Modernism vs. Pre-Modernism:The Need to Rethink the Basis of Military OrganizationalForms," in Military Ethics and Professionalism, ed. JamesBrown and Michael J. Collins, (Washington, D.C.: Na-tional Defense University Press, 1981), 55-74.

7. Ibid., pp. 63-72.

8. Ibid., p. 67.

9. Ibid., p. 55.

10. Manuel M. Davenport, "Professionals or HiredGuns?" Army, 30 (May 1980), pp. 13-14.

Ethics and the Miltary Organizadon 79

11. Elizabeth Anscombe, "War and Murder," in War,Morality and the Military Profession, ed. Malham M.Wakin (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1979), pp.285-287.

12. Cf. "Professionals or Hired Guns?" pp. 13-14.

13. Sam C. Sarkesian, "Moral and Ethical Foundations ofMilitary Professionalism," Military Ethics and Profes-sionalism, pp. 2, 20.

14. Samuel P. Huntington, "Officership as a Profession,"War, Morality and the Military Profession, pp. 20-22.

Chales W. Hudln

MORALITY AND THE MILITARYPROFESSION: PROBLEMSAND SOLUTIONS

THE FAMOUS BATTLE OF HASTINGS be-tween Harold, the Saxon King of England, and DukeWilliam of Normandy took place in the year 1066.This battle demonstrates how important technologywas to war, even 900 years ago. For in this battle aseemingly insignificant technological innovationproved to be the decisive factor in the battle. Bothsides knew of its existence, but only the Normans em-ployed it. This device had been employed by soldiershundreds of years earlier; however, the Saxons failedto realize its possibilities. In fact the device had beenperfected in France over the previous hundred years.At mid-morning the Normans advanced. The planwas to break the shield wall formed by the Englishwith a cavalry charge covered by a hail of arrowsfrom their bowmen. Nevertheless, the Normans were

Major Charles W. Hudlin, USAF, Associate Professor ofPhilosophy at the US Air Force Academy, presented thisessay at the Joint Services Conference on ProfessionalEthics at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana, January 1982.The essay is reprinted from the US Air Force AcademyJournal of Professional Military Ethics, December 1982.

81

82 Cheada W. Hudlin

thrown back with the defensive force of spears andaxes. In mid-afternoon the Normans staged a similarattack; once again the shield wall of the Englishrepelled the attack. However, this time the Englishmade a fatal mistake; they chased their attacker downthe hill onto level ground. As the Normans realizedwhat had happened, they turned on their pursuers,stood up in their stirrups (the device that allowedthem to use their lances effectively) and in the wordsof one historian, ". . . the Norman Cavalry Shock-troop went through the English mass like a hot knifethrough butter."' It is lessons from history such asthis that serve to remind us of the constant need tobring intelligence, imagination, and innovation to thetactics and strategy of war. When military leaders failto exercise such competence, soldiers die, battles arelost, and nations fall. Given these high stakes, theresponsibility to be technically competent may be thefirst moral responsibility of military commanders arndsupervisors. However, technical incompetence is notthe only source of an army's failure to function prop-erly. One finding of the now well-publicized ArmyWar College Study in 1970 was that ethical miscon-duct and incompetence were related in such a waythat the failure in one leads to failure in the other. 2

Assuming this is so, then soldiers die, battles are lost,and nations fall just as surely from moral in-competence as from technical incompetence. Giventhis close connection between morality and com-petence, and given that the writings of military pro-fessionals, and others, provide an accurate picture ofthe moral climate of the military services, than thereis apparently some cause for concern; for thesewriters continually document failures in personal in-tegrity, overconcern with image, careerism, and

Morality and the MHilasy Profession 53

misplaced loyalty as typifying daily activity ofmilitary life.

What has produced this unhappy circumstancefor the profession of arms? No doubt a number offactors, some of which I will comment on later, butone we might consider concerns the possibility thatthe high technology of modem warfare has made theneed for ethical commitment less obvious than it oncewas. At the end of World War 11 General Patton wasasked by a group of reporters to comment on thefollowing statement:We've been told about the wonder weapons the Germanswere working on, long-range rockets, push-button bomb-ing, weapons that don't need soldiers. General Patton issaid to have replied: Wonder weapons? My God I don't seethe wonder in them. Killing without heroics, nothing isglorified, nothing is reaffirmed. No heroes, no cowards,no troops, no generals. Only those who are left alive andthose who are left dead. I am glad I won't live to see it.3

Probably none of us will live to see the General'sworst fears fully realized, but there has already been atremendous advancement in the technology of war-fare. The modern soldier is commonly found inmissile silos, computer rooms, engineering labs,management teams, personnel offices, financecenters, and so forth. Many of the televisionrecruiting commercials for the services emphasize thisfact. The appeal is not to enter the military servicebecause it is a noble or good thing to do, but to enterbecause it will prepare a young man or woman for atechnical occupation in civilian life. I think that thisexpectation, along with the technical requirements ofsoldiering in today's military, makes it difficult forthese soldiers to comprehend the difference between

8U Chades W. HudIha

what they are doing in the military and what theymight do for IBM. As General Patton observed anumber of years ago, it is not easy to perceive thistechnical activity, even in the military environment,as heroic or as affirming values. So, while the argu-ment for integrity in the military profession based onthe nature of war is no less valid than it ever was,perhaps it has become psychologically less appealingto the modern soldier. I recall a conversation with anArmy sergeant who was a member of the componentcommand in Japan. He related to me how he hadbeen forced to engage in hand-to-hand combat withthe Viet Cong because the supply system had failed toresupply his unit with ammunition. It struck me then,as it still does, how tremendously varied the duties ofa modern soldier might be. This particular soldier wasrigorously trained in combat so that he could engagein hand-to-hand combat and win, and now he sat inmy class learning to employ the programs of a third-generation computer to plan for a future jointmilitary operation. There are two points to be madehere. First, this man, and others like him,understands very well the moral implications of afailure to perform military duty, and second, heunderstands these implications in a way most modernsoldiers never will. Wha~t is apparently needed is someway to instill in the modem, technologically orientedsoldier a keen sense of duty. In the Joint ServicesConference on Professional Ethics (JSCOPE) III itwas decided that the only people who can really solvethis problem are military commanders. I want to ex-plore institutional possibilities for assisting com-manders with this problem, but, first, let me say a bitmore about the problem.

Earlier I listed several of the moral deficiences ofthe military profession commonly cited by the pro-

Morait and the Mliltey Profession 85

fessional literature. I now want to fist more specifical-ly what these are. One Army chaplain states:

All decisions, practices, goals, and values of the entire in-stitutional structure which make ethical behavior difficultshould be examined, beginning with the following: First,blatant or subtle forms of ethical relativism which blur theissue of what is right or wrong, or which bury it as a sub-ject of little or no importance. Second, the exaggeratedloyalty syndrome, where people are afraid to tell the truthand are discouraged from it. Third, the obsession with im-age, where people are not even interested in the truth. Andlast, the drive for success, in which ethical sensitivity isbought off or sold because of the personal need toachieve.'

In an article in Air University Review an Air Forcelieutenant colonel makes these comments:

While the Chief emphasizes increased concern for thewelfare of our people to promote greater productivity,many individual leaders seem to parrot the right wordswhile they seek to fill the right squares in the right jobs toimpress the right people in the right places at the righttime. Our more perceptive personnel, especially theyounger ones, who are more adept at reading bodylanguage, see through the double standard shown and losefaith in the integrity of the leader.S

This colonel further reports that at a commanders'conference, when challenged to be completely honest,a commander remarked, "Commanders are notmartyrs. We did not make it this far by telling it like itreally is."' Not one of the remaining 34 commanderschallenged this statement. In their book Crisi in Corn-mand, Gabriel and Savage accused the Army of adopt-ing "a new ethical code rooted in the entrepreneurialmodel of the modem business corporation." 7 ADlof these comments might be summarized as a general

86 Chwaa W. Had&b

accusation charging that the traditional militaryvalues of integrity, duty, and selflessness havedegenerated to the point where today self-interest andcareerism are dominant values in the contemporarymilitary.

If I were to make an appraisal about the state ofhonor in the military profession strictly from my ownexperience. I would have to admit that, while there issome truth to these claims, I personally have neverbeen asked to do anything I considered unethical.However, I do know people who have. One case Iknow of involved two units employing and exercisinga new automated weapons system. Unit A could notmake the system work and so continued to operatemanually. Unit B reported that the system workedwell. So, the commander of Unit A, fearing an un-favorable comparision with Unit B, required his per-sonnel to submit false reports concerning the reliabili-ty of the weapons system. In another case a unit com-mander pressured a young lieutenant to falsify asecurity investigation in order to cover for a friend. Instill another instance, while I was observing two ofthe Air Force Academy's Honor Representatives briefa group of liaison officers, one of the officers, an AirForce major, made this comment, "I think that theHonor Code you have here at the Academy is justfine; it is exactly what you need here. However, whenyou get out in the Air Force, you may have to learn totolerate." This comment was followed by another of-ficer's, "Yes, remember, you can only fall on yoursword once." My perception is that most junior of-ficers believe these comments are correct. In addition,I continually hear reports from cadets returning fromsummer programs, which involve them in the ac-tivities of Air Force units, where they often see

Morat ad the Militay Profession 87

breaches of integrity. Apparently, they often get apoor impression of Air Force members.

I suppose that, given all of this, one might jumpto the conclusion that ethical problems in the militaryare at an epidemic proportion. I doubt that this is so.However, ethical problems have reached the point atwhich they are certainly troublesome. If nothing else,they seem to affect our confidence in ourselves. Idon't believe that I can provide a method of solvingthese problems that will ensure that the level of in-tegrity in the armed forces will reach a new height,but I do think that progress can be made in winningsupport for ethical standards. It seems to me thatthere is room for improvement by military institu-tions in three areas. First, I believe there is a certainkind of institutional pressure in the military that en-courages officers to go beyond healthy ambition. Sec-ond, there is no clearly stated and promulgatedethical standard; and third, there is no well-thought-out ethics education program. Naturally the com-ments that follow are based on my experience andobservations in the Air Force. So, what I have to saymay not apply to the other services, although I thinkthat it will, at least in concept.

First, what is the nature of this pressure that in-duces many officers to move from healthy ambitionto what might be described as blind ambition? Of-ficially it is called career management. It is backed bythe "up-or-out" promotion system, and it looks, onthe surface, like a benign, efficient method by whichto engage talented people in falr competition to fulfillcareer goals and ensure the right people are promotedto the right rank and job. It may actually accomplishthese objectives in many cases. But I am quite certain

5 Charws W. Hudin

that this system also produces unhealthy and,therefore, undesirable side effects. Officers are con-stantly encouraged to engage in what often look liketicket-punching exercises and square-filling projects.We must attend the right schools, pursue the rightjobs, work for the right endorsements, avoid low pro-motion career fields, etc. There is nothing wrong withcareer advancement, but all too often career advance-ment is manifested as careerism where the real aim isto game the system in order to create a good recordfor a promotion board, rather than earnestly try to doa good job and allow promotion to follow as a matterof course. And is this so surprising? What is at stakefor each officer at a promotion board (at least up tothe grade of 05) is not merely a promotion or self-image, but a career, a life's work. I have talked to anumber of officers who express great relief when theymake this promotion. They tell me that it is not thethought of working less or being less dedicated thanthey once were that bothers them, but that this pro-motion provides relief from a coercive system. Sonow, should they feel that their commander is askingthem to do something they consider either stupid orunethical, there is not the coercive threat of a deathblow to a career that there once was. Many captainsand majors I have talked with express this same senti-ment as they look forward to the promotion thatmarks a successful career and basically guarantees acomplete career. In Vietnam the officers who mostoften refused to obey orders they considered eitherstupid or unethical were not the career professionals,but the reserve officers who were not career minded.$Should we conclude from this that reserve officers arepersons of greater integrity than career officers? Ithink not. The difference is that the reserve officer

Morality and the Militay PrOuio 89

could not be so easily coerced by the threat of a badeffectiveness report. The reserve officer did not haveso much at stake.

If it is true, and I think that it is, that the up-or-out system is the underlying cause of the pressure toconform in situations where protest is proper, thenwhat should the services do? I think the services mayhave to decide what they want most. The present pro-motion system has proved to be an effective means ofcontrol and perhaps has provided necessary healthycompetition in many cases. However, if I and otherswho think this way are correct, then the system hasalso produced a great deal of pressure to conform toor even initiate unethical activities. Remember theliaison officer who said to an Honor Representativethat "you can only fall on your sword once." It is soeasy to rationalize away each small unethical act asrelatively unimportant and to think that it is notworth risking a bad effectiveness report over, until alife-long habit of rationalization begins to guide allsuch decisions. Perhaps it is too much to ask ofmorally good people that they risk a career to upholda standard, even one they believe in. After all, howmany of us are made of the stuff of martyrs? Recallthe remark of the commander who said, "Com-manders are not martyrs. We did not make it this farby telling it like it really is." What is needed here is asafe avenue of protest, or perhaps the whole promo-tion system needs to be reconsidered in light of its truecost.

The second factor, which I earlier suggested af-fects moral integrity in the services, is the absence of aclearly stated and well-promulgated ethical standard.If this sounds like a call for a military code of ethics,that's because it is. This suggestion proved to be quite

901 Charles W. Hudlin

unpopular at JSCOPE III when proposed by Pro-fessor Richard Gabriel, but I want to examine theissue of a written code a bit further. In general, Ithink that it would be a good thing for the militaryprofession to state what its standards are, just as in1955 President Eisenhower placed into effect theCode of Conduct. This code was to serve as the moralstandard for soldiers in combat, and especially forprisoners of war. What is needed is a similar codewhich embodies the etlbics of everyday situationswhich commanders would be charged to uphold. Letus examine some of the standard objections to a writ-ten code. It is often argued that there is an unwrittencode and it is this code which is transmitted by thepractice of the senior members of the profession.And, further, that even if there was a written code, itwould still be the practice of senior members that ac-tually communicates the real code. No doubt this istrue, but I fail to see how this diminishes the value ofa written code. A written standard provides guidanceto senior as well as junior members of the militaryand is a measure of the mentors as well as the"mented." It would also be easier for the seniormembers of the profession to call attention to thestandards if they were written. Another objection tothe idea of a written code is that the written code maycreate more problems than it solves because therewould be a thousand interpretations of it. This argu-ment is quite puzzling. If it is meant that the writtencode will be subject to various interpretations whilethe unwritten code will not, then this is indeed verycurious. What sort of immunity from numerous inter-pretations is it that an unwritten code enjoys that awritten code does not? If the unwritten code can bespoken, then it too, just like a written code, can be

Morality ad the Miliary Profession 91

misinterpreted or interpreted in various ways. If it istrue that there will be a thousand interpretations of awritten code, then we must be a thousand times worseoff without it because there will be a thousand inter-pretations of a thousand different unwritten codes.Now, just what is the unwritten code? I think that areal case could be made that at least one of the un-written codes is the following: "It's a dog-eat-dogworld; you've got to look out for yourself because noone else will. Take care of yourself first, your friends,and your boss." I can't recall how many times I heardthe first Air Force officer that I worked for, a lieute-nant colonel, tell me, "You've got to look out for oldnumber one." Unwritten codes like this have led meto believe that it would be useful for the services toadopt a written statement of professional ethics.Presently, these unwritten codes go unchallenged byany official ethic. Generally, the most forceful argu-ment against a written code is that it is impossible toenforce. That is, if anyone is thinking of administer-ing the code with honor courts or honor boards, thenthat is just impractical. With this argument I am incomplete agreement. After working closely with theHonor Code at the Air Force Academy, both its in-struction and administration, and observing the dif-ficulties associated with the administrative process, Ifear that any attempt to similarly administer a codeon a vastly expanded scale would end in an ad-ministrative nightmare. Notice that granting themerits of this argument does not show that a code iseither useless or impossible, but only indicates thatthere are limits on how a code could be enforced.Perhaps a more realistic way to encourage support forprofessional ethics is to evaluate an officer's perform-ance in this area as the Air Force presently evalutes

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92 Chwin W. Haadlin

human relations skills, and that is to include theevaluation on the effectiveness report. My real in-terest in having a written code is not, however, for thepurpose of enforcement, but of enlightenment. This,then, brings us to the third area which I identified as aproblem area for the military institution, ethicseducation.

As I reflect on my own ethical training in themilitary, there is very little to reflect on. At Officers'Training School, which I attended nine years ago, Irecall a great deal of instruction on drill andceremonies, communication, leadership, manage-ment concepts, and Air Force organization, but Idon't recall a single lesson on ethics, although I amsure there must have been at least one. One is exactlywhat I recall from Squadron Officers' School (a three-month school for junior officers). Currently, there isno ongoing ethics education program in the Air Forceas there is for human relations, drugs, and alcoholabuse. Both West Point and the Air Force Academyteach a single ethics course as part of their core cur-riculum. I believe that an independent assessment, byanyone who understands the complexity of the sub-ject, would require officer candidates to know moreabout ethical decisions and particular ethical dilem-mas than a one-semester course at an Academy or itsequivalent in officer training programs elsewhere.One contemporary psychologist states:

But if the movement to teach ethics is serious aboutdeveloping not only the capacity to think ethically but alsothe commitment to act ethically, then it will have to findways to fire the will as well as the intellect, to engg theheart as deeply as the mind, and to put will, intellect, andfeeling to the test of behavior. Armechairing alone won't do

Momalty and the Migway Profeizien 93

the job. Engaging and developing the whole person is un-qestionably a tail order, more than any one-semestercourse can do adequately, perhaps more than many educa-tional institutions are prepared to tackle, but that, fromthe standpoint of moral psychology, is the size of the task.'

The point is that the military services have never real-ly made a weli-planned and comprehensive attempt toprovide soldiers an education in ethics. I don't meanto fault them for this because, in times past, perhapsthere was no real reason to think they should. Butgiven present circumstances, there is now. In an inter-view after Watergate, John Dean was asked:

Do you think that the outcome of your career might havebeen different had the law school focused on the questionsof professional responsibility to a greater extent?" Hereplied, "No, I don't think so. I must say that I knew thatthe things I was doing were wrong, and one learns the dif-ference between right and wrong long before one enterslaw school. A course in legal ethics wouldn't have changedanything.' 0

Perhaps John Dean should have taken a coursein ethics, and then he might not have made this com-ment. If he had taken a course in ethics, he wouldhave learned that in most courses at least there is noattempt to teach a student right from wrong, at leastnot in the ordinary sense. What most university ethicscourses teach is ethical theory and moral dilemmaresolution. This amounts to trying to understandwhat makes a right act right or a wrong act wrong andthen applying whatever moral insight is obtainedthrough this study to some difficult moral questions.I suspect that what John Dean meant when he saidthat he knew right from wrong was that he knew it

was against the rules to do what he did. Knowing that

94 Chides W. Hudhy

some act violates a rule, and understanding the validi-ty of the rule and believing in it and the point of viewthat backs it up are two different things. Consider thethings you tell your children about morality. Whatrules do you recommend to them? Do you merely tellthem the rules or do you attempt to provide an ex-planation of the importance of the rules? It seems ob-vious to me that the explanation of why right is rightand wrong is wrong is as important as the rule itself.This is what ethics courses typically explore. I cannotsay for certain that if John Dean had taken an ethicscourse, even a good one, he would not have behavedas he did, but neither should he say, as he does, that itwould have made no difference. The point is, if ex-planation and justification are taken to be importantin gaining allegiance to a moral standard, then ethicseducation can be a valuable part of professional train-

inOne might ask: What would a credible ethicseducation program look like? I think that the serviceacademies should require at least two courses: a basiccourse in ethical theory followed by a problemscourse focusing on moral problems relevant to themilitary profession. This will allow time to adequatelycover both topics whereas a single course does not.Further, the courses could be spaced at least a yearapart. Some studies indicate that there is a "sleeper ef-fect" following a course in ethics. This means that theeffects of the course do not show up in student think-ing or behavior until a year later. By spacing thecourses out in this manner, the second course couldbetter take advantage of that effect, plus whatevernatural maturing might also take place in students. Acomparable program could be worked out for other

MeewIt ad the M1i~tuiry Profeuuion

commissioning programs. Beyond this, there needs tobe an ongoing program aimed at continuous ethicseducation for all service members. I think that thereare some parallels between the need for an ethics pro-gram and the need that existed in the Air Force tenyears ago for a social actions program. In 1971 theChief of Staff of the Air Force established a func-tional area to address problems of race relations anddrug and alcohol abuse. This move was made inresponse to the civil rights movement and the "nowgeneration," both of which had a significant impacton the attitudes of persons entering the military ser-vice in the sixties and seventies. The perception wasthat an immediate and, hopefully, well-thought-outcounterattack was in order. The result was the socialactions program. I Haven't there been similar phe-nomena with regard to ethical attitudes? Whether wecall it the "now generation," the "me generation," orwhatever, the attitudes of young people towards thetraditional military values are not what they oncewere. I have seen the following experiment conductedseveral times. An Honor Representative at theAcademy is teaching fourth classmen a lesson aboutthe Honor Code. He asks, "How many of youcheated in high school?" Inevitably 95%? of them willhold up their hand. Just as inevitably, the group withtheir hands up accuse the others of lying. The declara-tion is that "everyone cheats in high school." The sim-pie virtues of honesty as required by the Honor Codeare a drastic change for most new cadets. It seemsclear to me that a major counterattack is called forhere, that a functional area needs to be establishedwithin each service to develop an initial and an ongo-ing ethics education program that will address themoral issues and conflicts of the military profession.

96 ChadI W. Hudihi

It seems that the Army has already taken a step in thisdirection with the establishment of the Ethics Divi-sion at the Soldiers Support Center. Perhaps somesort of joint service task force should be establishedto develop a program that could then be tailored andadministered by each service to suit its own needs.

Let me now briefly summarize the ground I havecovered. The basic assumption was that only com-manders and supervisors can make significantchanges in the military. This is true whether we aretalking about moral development or dress codes. Thequestion then posed was, what can the military in-stitution do to help commanders and supervisors en-sure high moral standards are maintained? Myanswer is three things. First, the institution can takethe pressure off by providing a safe avenue of dissentover moral issues, and this may mean modifying thepromotion system's up-or-out policy. Second, adopta written ethical standard similar to the Code of Con-duct so that the ethical requirements of the militaryprofession will be clear, uniform, and well pro-mulgated. Finally, create an office of primary respon-sibility for ethics education. If these actions aretaken, it seems to me that we could anticipate, in thelong term, significant improvement in the moralclimate of the military services. If some substantial ef-fort is not adopted, which wili certainly include an in-vestment of manpower and money, I fear that we mayfind ourselves like the Saxons, being hacked to piecesby the Normans, not because they thought to use astirrup when we didn't, but because our moralfailures, along with our lack of personal integrity,destroyed the overall integrity of the Americanmilitary establishment as a fighting force.

Morey and the AMuy Professon 97

NOTES

1. James Burke, Connections (Boston, Mass.: Brown andCompany, 1979), p. 51.

2. Malham M. Wakin, "Ethics of Leadership," in MalhamM. Wakin, ed., War, Morality, and the Military Profes-sion (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1979), p. 210.

3. According to the movie, Patton.

4. Chaplin Kermit D. Johnson (Colonel), "Ethical Issuesof Military Leadership," in Parameters, vol. IV, no. 2,1974, pp. 35-39.

5. Raymond F. Hamel (Lt. Col.), "Are Professionalismand Integrity only a Myth," in Air University Review, vol.XXIX, May-June 1978, pp. 60-67.

6. Ibid.

7. Richard A. Gabriel and Paul L. Savage, Crisis in Com-mand (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), p. 17.

8. Ibid.

9. Thomas Likona, "What Does Moral Psychology Haveto Say to the Teacher of Ethics?" in Daniel Callahan andSissela Bok, eds., Ethics Teaching in Higher Education(New York: Plenum Press, 1980), p. 132.

10. Ibid., p. 129.

I1. Reginald P. Gibson (Lt. Col.) and Joseph H. Puzo(Maj.) "Social Actions Programs," in an Air War Collegecourse book, USAF Personnel Management, vol. I, ch. 14,pp. 27-34.

ETHICAPRALCTCES

A VL

Richard A. Gabriel

LEGITIMATE AVENUES OFMILITARY PROTEST IN ADEMOCRATIC SOCIETY

THE EXPERIENCE Of the American Armyduring 10 years of conflict in Indochina produced aseries of behavioral deficiences which seem almostendemic to the military structure itself. Among the

r most important of these was a military careerism soexaggerated that protection and advancement of anofficer's relative career position, at all levels, becamethe highest operant value for a substantial number ofofficers. This metamorphosis of military values wasnot without its practical effects on the operationalcapabilities of the Army itself. In general, however,the change in the career value structure resulted in aseries of moral and ethical failures defined in terms ofofficers acquiescing, initiating, or participating inpolicies and actions which individually they regarded

Dr. Richard A. Gabriel, Professor of Politics at St.Anseim's College in Manchester, New Hampshire, hasauthored a number of books, including Crisis in Com-mand, a study of the American Army in the Vietnam era,and To Serve With Honor. This article is reprinted fromthe US Air Force Academy Journal of ProfessionalMilitary Ethics, April 1980.

lei

102 Richard A. Galel

as unethical, but which were followed as the way tocareer advancement. Further, there is no reason tobelieve that this lapse in military ethics has been cor-rected.

Why did this situation occur? Why did the of-ficer corps allow itself to participate in a series of"Vietnam horrors" contrary to the stated ethos of"duty, honor, and country"? It seems clear that theexaggerated emphasis upon careerism to the point ofacquiescing in almost every policy without oppositioncould only have happened in a military structurewhich has consistently failed to develop an ethicaldoctrine of resistance. Thus, such shorthand injunc-tions as "it all counts for twenty," "don't rock theboat," "you can't tell the general that," while clearlydysfunctional from an ethical and operational pointof view, actually become very functional doctrines forindividual career advancement. To be sure such ad-vancement then becomes purchased at the expense offailure to question higher orders virtually regardlessof operational consequences. In the end, the Vietnamera witnessed the development of an officer corpswhose members acquiesced in policies, orders, andactions that many strongly disagreed with from a per-sonal moral perspective but supported nevertheless asa means of career advancement.

The extent of the problem is obvious and embar-rassing. In 10 years of warfare, not a single generalofficer resigned in protest over the policies conductedin Vietnam; indeed, we cannot find a single instancewhere a general officer refused, by way of resigna-tion, to execute a single policy, although it now ap-pears in retrospect that several of them may have hadserious reservations about the effectiveness of someof these policies. Alternatively, despite evidence that

Legidte Avenues o Miltary Proaet 93

specific policies were failing and had been failing foryears, not only did no resignations occur but ap-parently neither did any senior officers protest.Moreover, we cannot locate a single colonel or lieu-tenant colonel who chose to resign. In fact, the onlyexamples of resignation or protest seemed to have oc-curred at the lower levels of the officer corps and eventhen only rarely. There are, of course, a few examplesof officers actually refusing to execute specific ordershere and there, but such behavior was largelysporadic and in almost all cases confined to junior of-ficers who were not career officers but OCS andROTC graduates who were in "for two and go." Inthe end, it is difficult to escape the impression thatresistance and protest, or even criticism, as moralalternatives to acquiescing in orders that an officerseriously disagreed with, were not established prac-tices during the Vietnam conflict.

If the Army is ever to recover from the debacle ofVietnam, it must first undergo a "moral renaissance"as an essential precondition for further operationalrebuilding. Among its first priorities must be to en-sure that its officers develop the capacity to balancemoral and career considerations more responsibly.Such a capacity is required at all rank levels, but mostcertainly at the general officer level where the ears ofthe policy makers are more readily available. Accord-ingly, it is imperative that the Army develop a doc-trine of moral protest for use by the officer corps. It isbeyond question that such a doctrine must be consis-tent in theory and in practice with the values of ademocratic society and continued civilian control ofthe military apparatus. Any doctrine violating thesebasic precepts would be unacceptable and dangerous,

1(14 Rkhwd A. Gab#~

tending to provide the justification for a possiblecoup d'6tat.

What, then, are the morally permissible avenuesof protest for the military officer consistent with thedemocratic values of American society and civiliancontrol of the military? Are there courses of action amilitary officer may properly take when faced withthe problem of being ordered to execute or acquiescein policies which he personally and morally findsunacceptable? Four courses of action seem open, allconsistent with the basic precepts already discussed.These courses of action are (1) resignation; (2) requestfor relief in protest; (3) appealing orders to highercommand; (4) refusal to execute an order. None ofthese alternatives conflict with the military traditionof Western civilization. Since none are inherentlyassociated with collective resistance, nothing of themenace of a coup d'dtat can be associated with any ofthese alternatives. It is important to observe that theAmerican Army has never developed, nor has it madean effort to develop, any doctrine of moral resistanceto immoral or ethically unacceptable orders.'I It wasprecisely in this official moral vacuum that the exag-gerated value of careerism could operate with suchcompulsion in Vietnam.

1. Raigmatiom. The most obvious ways in which amilitary officer may demonstrate his disagreementwith, or moral outrage toward, official policy is sim-ply to resign in protest. Further, resignation can beaccompanied by a public declaration as to the reasonimpelling him to resign, thus exposing the policy inquestion to public scrutiny and debate. Such a courseof action is perfectly consistent with democratic

Legitimate Avenues of Military Protest 195

values and in no way challenges civilian control of themilitary structure. Moreover, in a practical way,resignation presents evidence to the "system" thatpolicies may be in serious error, and to that extent dis-sent may increase system "rationality."

Resignation is almost always a more powerfultool when used by a general officer. Indeed, being themost effective means that a general officer canemploy, since he is likely to be closer to the policymaking level than his subordinates, his resignationcan be expected to have the greater impact on policy.Practically, of course, the general officer risks little inthe way of career benefits by his resignation as he isnot asked to terminate his career in midstream asmight be the case with a junior officer and takes hisretirement benefits with him. Confronted with apolicy that is morally objectionable, the general of-ficer easily has the best chance of making his objec-tions felt through resignation because he has the earof the policy makers or can usually get to them. Atthe same time, he is identified in the public mind as a

rl powerful figure whose resignation would have highpublicity impact and ultimately he relinquishes onlyterminal career goals. He will surely fail to make chiefof staff.

Drawing on the doctrine of respondeat superior,it may even be argued that the general officer,because of his superior position in the authority struc-ture of the Army, has a greater moral obligation toact than does the junior officer simply because of hisposition, which carries with it a stronger moral chargeto see to the welfare of his subordinates and those hehas sworn to serve. 2 In any event, resignation, whilesurely an appropriate course of action for all officers,cannot reasonably be expected to occur in largenumbers among the junior officer corps except in ex-

106 Richard A. Gabriel

treme cases. In the first place, it is unrealistic to ex-pect junior officers to forgo career goals midway inthe process of attaining them and, most important,the resignation of junior officers, unless done inmass, is likely to have only limited, if any, effect onpolicy. Accordingly, what is needed are additionalavenues of military protest which are available to thebulk of the officer corps below the general level.

11. Request for Relief in Protest. We have alreadyargued that below the general officer level resignationwill not be terribly common nor effective under pres-ent conditions. Yet, this does not relieve the juniorofficer from his obligation to take action in the faceof policies he considers immoral. 3 Accordingly, whenconfronted with "local" policies or orders which aremorally objectionable, an officer must be providedwith an option to effectuate a moral choice. Con-fronted with immoral local policies or orders -shooting prisoners and civilians, burning of civiliandwellings, poisoning of wells, etc. -an officer has themoral option to request formally that he be relievedof participating in such practices by requesting atransfer. Such an action, taking place in writing aswell as orally, immediately engages the Armybureaucracy and has the effect of creating a writtenrecord as well as bringing the case to the attention ofsuperior command and staff. This creates a set of cir-cumstances in which the junior officer has dischargedhis obligation to himself and to the Army by makingknown improper practices to his superiors. At the veryleast, this course of action reduces the possibility thata superior can hide behind the doctrine of plausible

Lea jibmate A venues of MUifty Prwaet 17

denial by claiming that he did not know what wasgoing on in the field.'

To be sure, not all requests for transfer will begranted. Yet, if the issue raised is truly one of illegali-ty or severe immorality, experience with the militarybureaucracy suggests that the request Will not beblocked at the lower levels. Rather, in an effort toavoid making a difficult decision, we suspect that atendency toward upward buck-passing will develop sothat such requests will be transmitted rapidly up thechain of command. This is in contrast to the "normal"transfer request in which no moral issue is raised,which tends to be handled at the lowest level possible.In any case, a request for transfer on the pround thatlocal policies are immoral or illegal does provide anofficer with a viable and feasible mechanism for exer-cising his moral obligations consistent with hisrelative position within the military hierarchy.

111. Appeal Orders to a Higher Command. Theassumption in any military structure, especially one asdedicated to democratic values as our own, is that il-legal or immoral orders will not be deliberately issuedas a matter of official policy. To be sure, a local com-mander may overtly or covertly condone and en-courage the torturing of prisoners, such a "policy"being directly local and not the official policy of theArmy per se. This distinction opens up still anotheravenue that an officer may choose in effectuating amoral position whose object is the changing of a prac-tice or policy which he regards as immoral. An officerconfronted with a moral dilemma may legitimatelytake the additional step of "going over the head" ofhis superiors as a formal means of protest. Whereas

198 Rielwd A. Gabri

the object of such a choice is clearly to bring to the at-tention of higher authorities the practices and policieswhich are morally objectionable in the hope that theywill be changed, the directed charge is clearly that theimmediate ordering commander is exceeding hisauthority by formulating policies or ordering ac-tivities which his superiors would not permit if theyknew about them.

To some minor extent, the military does providefor this alternative through the office of the InspectorGeneral. However, such protests through this officeare often officious, bureaucratic, and slow, not tomention evoking a feeling of disloyalty. The recom-mendation is that the concerned officer go to the rele-vant superior within the chain of command. Conven-) tiona) military wisdom implies that remedial actionwill take place relatively rapidly, a fact that can be ofgreat importance if the policy objected to is the tor-turing of prisoners or the shooting of civilians. Someevidence suggests, however, that these remedies areoften neutralized by the compulsion to "teamplaying." Even so, a determined officer has avenuesof redress if he chooses to pay the career price.

IV. Refusal. To this point, an attempt has been madeto delineate possible avenues of moral protestavailable to the military officer consistent with thepractical difficulties involved. Yet, the stress on theease or difficulty with which a given course of actionmay or may not be implemented should not obscurethe basic point, namely, a moral obligation notdischarged in the face of practical difficulties remainsno less a moral obligation. Inescapably, there is likelyto come a point when the military officer has either

Legitimate A venues of Milk., Pretest 10

attempted to effect change in other more practicalways ("don't resign; stay in and change the system")or realized that the costs of implementing his moralimperative become ruinous to his career. In such a setof circumstances, the obligation remains.

In any situation of obligation and obedience, theultimate response that a military officer can make toorders requiring actions that the individual considersmorally wrong or illegal is the ultimate right to refuseto carry them out. Such an action is clearly the lastresort and a response to extreme moral pressures, andis further premised upon the assumption that the in-dividual is willing to accept the consequences of hisact if it is later judged to have been wrong.'

The refusal to carry out an order issued by alegitimate authority is prima facie an illegal act,although not an immoral one. Further, refusal toobey is a way to effectuate a moral choice, not onlyimmediately by the singular act of disobeying, butalso in another way. Any refusal to obey an order im-mediately engages the military's legal conflict resolu-tion structure, namely, the court-martial, in much thesame way that the technical violation of a civil lawengages the civilian courts, which then become themechanism for having the law that was disobeyedjudged definitively in terms of its application. Theengagement of the court-martial system because of anofficer's refusal to execute an order he believes to beimmoral or illegal provides two opportunities. First,it provides a forum in which the individual may statehis moral case in public in an attempt to justify his ac-tion. Second, it provides the military structure itselfwith the opportunity to evaluate the case relative tothe order issued and to take appropriate actionagainst the issuing authority if so justified. Thus, the

110 Rkchard A. Gabdie

court-martial is a two-way street. Like the Americanlegal structure itself, a court-martial can only respondto a justiciable issue and, again like the Americanlegal system, a justiciable issue can only be consideredso after some law or directive has in fact beenviolated. Accordingly, viewed in this light, the act ofrefusing to carry out an order deemed by the in-dividual to be immoral really constitutes an appealwithin the military legal structure to higher authorityfor a judgment on the original order itself. From thisperspective, refusal becomes the military equivalentof technical civil disobedience in the service of ahigher moral case. It is not equivalent to cowardice ordisloyalty in any a priori sense.

V. What we have attempted to this point is todelineate and explain several courses of action opento the military officer faced with the difficult choiceof effectuating a moral choice in the face of careerimperatives. Clearly, some avenues of protest aremore practical than others. Moreover, certain protestalternatives carry greater risks. Even so, all theavenues of protest outlined above are legitimate inthat they are consistent with the dominant values ofthe democratic polity that the officer swears to serve.Further, they are equally consistent with the militaryvalues of "duty, honor, and country" when properlyunderstood. The first moral obligation of any officeris to ensure that his conduct and that of his superiorsis basically consonant with the values of the societyand the constitution that he has sworn to upholdtogether with the moral constraints of the militarysystem. From that perspective, none of the courses ofaction available to effect moral protest may be con-

Lesidbote A veume of Militay reteat III

strued as a moral basis for massive disobedience ofcivilian authority by the military structure. In short,the question of coups d'6tat drawn on moral lines isbeyond the scope of the argument as presented.

What is interesting in attempting to come to gripswith the problem of moral protest within a militarystructure is the fact that the principal democratic na-tion within Western society, the United States, hasbeen unsuccessful in developing a doctrine concern-ing the subject, while other nations have developed afunctional ethos of protest within their own armedservices. For example, both British and Frenchsocieties have long recognized the right of the militaryofficer to resign in protest and, indeed, he is expectedto resign over questions of honor. With respect to theGermans, the mechanisms of moral protest have beenpreserved in the operation of the Board of Honor(although this "Board" could function as well todiscipline officers failing to meet standards of honor)and, in some extreme cases, even in the legitimationof suicide as a permissible course of action. TheJapanese code of Bushido, which literally requiredsuicide from an officer who felt himself in moraldisagreement with military policy, is too well knownto require further elaboration here. Now, to be sure,some of these measures are rather extreme whileothers, such as the French and English examples, areentirely consistent with democratic values. The pointis, however, that military structures in other societieshave developed a functional doctrine of resistance forthe military officer caught between the demands ofconscience and the orders of his superiors.

As for the severe behavioral irregularities thatwere widespread in Vietnam, they may be linked to afailure to evolve a mechanism for moral protest. That

112 Richard A. Gabrie

this failure had serious consequence for the behaviorof the officer corps during the Vietnam conflict isbeyond question. However, the failure to develop aformal doctrine of moral protest is only part of thedifficulty. The fact is that the formal rules of anybureaucratic structure will be effective only to the ex-tent that they are supported and reinforced by the in-formal norms and values of that structure. Thus, themoral failures of the American officer corps haddeveloped no formalized doctrine of moral guidance.Moreover, the informal rules of the military sub-society -"don't rock the boat," "it all counts fortwenty," "be loyal to your superiors" - would have ef-fectively worked to undercut the operation of anysuch doctrine. In short, the doctrines functional tocareer success, although informally articulated, standin stark opposition to those doctrines requiring theofficer to make moral choices. Stated otherwise,violation of traditional codes of honor not only paidoff in career terms, but was in fact virtually de-manded by the terms of the system itself.

This tension between informal norms functionalto individual career advancement and an attempt todevelop a formalized doctrine of moral protest withinthe officer corps can be expected to persist even in theface of the most sincere efforts at reform. Given thedevelopment of a formalized code of moral behavior,the fact remains that informal norms have to bedeveloped and deeply embedded in the military struc-ture to the extent that the officer who exercises hismoral prerogatives is not degraded or discriminatedagainst by his peers or superiors. Members of the of-ficer corps at all levels must come to realize that theexercise of moral prerogative is both a loyal andmoral manner of acting. We must come to make such

LeiiihnA&eAveuaes.1Mt. wrymw 113

actions functional from the perspective Of Career in-terests so as to encourage their undertakng. As thingsnow stand, the officer who goes over hiscommander's head, resigns from the service or goes tothe IG is commonly viewed as "disloyal" or a"quitter." In a very real sense, the military has madeindividual loyalty an absolute while almost ignoringor even neutralizing the moral commitment themilitary system requires if it is to be at all cohesive. Atthe very least, such action is regarded as damaging toan individual loyalty and not a higher one. so long asviolations of the latter are allowed to remain func-tional to career advancement, then it is unlikely thatany formalized code of behavior relevant to moralresistance will take root.

VI. The case for a formalized doctrine of moral pro-test within the military structure is not without its op-ponents, especially as it addresses the twin perspec-tives of resignation and refusal to execute orders.Concerning the latter, the argument against develop-ing and implementing such a code is simply that ifevery commander had to go around explaining everyorder (or at least demonstrate that it was not im-moral) to every officer in order to gain compliance,then the military structure would border on paralysisand bring into question its ability to carry out itsmission effectively. The argument is not overly con-vincing. Questions of moral choice do not, as a ruleanyway, arise so frequently as to merit the charge thatall orders would have to be justified to subordinatesin advance. Indeed, if conditions are such as to pro-voke a substantial number of officers to demand suchjustification, this in itself would be a clear indication

114 Richad A. Gabrie

that the military structure was already approachingbreakdown. In a word, if a large number of officersare forced to conclude that certain policies requirequestioning on such a large scale, then we would bemerely witnessing the symptoms of a disease which inall probability is already terminal.

Resignation as a course of action to effectuatemoral protest is most often criticized on the groundsthat it amounts to "quitting." Why not, the argumentgoes, stay within the system and work to bring aboutchanges? To the extent that the argument has anymerit, it is clearly more applicable at the general of-ficer level where verbal disagreement may provokepolicy change. To be sure, the question of future suc-cess remains open, but available evidence drawn fromthe past suggests that staying within the system andtrying to change it simply do not work. Consider thatduring the 10 years of the Vietnam conflict, amultitude of individuals faced the problem of moralchoice over one policy or another. Yet, since no oneresigned at the general officer level, we may assumethat such men stayed on to continue their efforts tochange the system. However, it seems clear that forall their efforts (most undocumented), little in theway of major policy change was accomplished andthe Vietnam "horrors" endured. The conclusionseems clear that the alternative of "working within thesystem" really begs the moral question, since theevidence we have available points overwhelmingly tothe fact that such a strategy simply did not work tobring about change. In the end, it seems more prob-able that the system changed the dissenters than thatthe dissenters changed the system.

Lesftxmae A venues of Afiltary Pfetest 115

VU. In assessing the failure of the American militarystructure to develop a doctrine of moral protestlegitimated for use by its officer corps, it seems clearthat one major effect of this failure was the tendencyfor career functional norms to take precedence over,or act as substitutes for, moral guidelines in the faceof questionable orders and policies. Accordingly,careerism, ran, and apparently continues to run, ram-pant, constituting a danger to truly effective militaryorganization and operations. It provokes the worsttype of disloyalty under the guise of loyalty, namely,a marked failure to question policy or practices whicheither do not work (falsification of intelligencereports, search and destroy, etc.) or else extract toohigh a moral price for their success (bombing ruralpopulations in order to force them into cities as amechanism for increasing control). What is clearlyneeded is the development of a formal Army doctrinewhich teaches officers the accepted avenues of moralprotest and encourages them, through the support ofinformal organizational values, to travel theseavenues when urged to do so by the press of personalcourage and morality.

The fact that other cultures and militaryorganizations have developed such doctrines to servethe same ends in their armies is proof enough that thetask is not impossible or unachievable. We must, ofcourse, always take care to ensure that the pathwaysof moral protest for the military remain consistentwith the democratic values of the polity as a wholeand are never allowed to become an excuse for coor-dinated military action against properly constitutedcivilian authority. In the end we are tempted to con-clude that we have far less to fear from a coup d'dtatthan from a military organization full of careerist

116 Rkiwar A. Gebdle

values. Such a structure can only become increasinglyout of touch with the values of the society which itostensibly serves. Further, it risks disaster for thatsociety and for itself, not through design (the coupd'dtat), but through incompetence as manifested in itsincreasing inability to challenge and ultimately resistpolicies and practices whose primary value rests in thecontention that they are functional to career achieve-ment.

NOTES

I. However, it is true that the American Army doessubscribe to the Geneva Convention. Further, every youngofficer is told at some point in his career that he may refusean order, but it is quickly added that every order is pre-sunned to be legal until proven otherwise. Anyone who hashad the experience of sitting through these basic indoc-trination features is quite aware of the fact that they arenot regarded as serious guides to action. Indeed, the notionof abiding by the rules of "civilized combat" as specified inthe Geneva Convention is often treated as impractical andwith contempt. In any event, a doctrine of moral resistancefor the military officer has never been developed by theAmerican Army nor has it received the kind cf informalsupport which would be required if such a docttine were tofunction successfully.

2. Principally, respondeat superior has been used as adefense against charges of war crimes during World War 11and was rejected by international tribunals as a validdefense. The concept has two broader dimensions. Thefirst is that Western military codes enjoin obedience tolegal orders. Further, responsibility for illegal acts increasesas the chain of command rises. Indeed, where war crimesoccur the failures to exercise control associated with thosecrimes among subordinates, even in the absence of knowl-

Lqitlmate Avenmues of Miliary Protest 117

edge thereof, is no defense. Essentially, he who commandsis responsible.

3. Such obligations spring from many sources, not the leastof which are the values of the society that an officer hassworn to uphold, as well as the military organization ofwhich he is a part. In any event, such obligations are per-sonally imposed and the obligation would exist qua obliga-tion whether the means to effectuate it are functional tocareer advancement or not. In short, the case of cir-cumstantial ethics is rejected.

4. Note that the "plausible denial" doctrine at least implic-itly was the defense pled by Captain Medina and, ultimate-ly, Major General Koster in the My Lai massacre pro-ceedings. It is precisely the doctrine of "plausible denial"which violates In Re Yamashita and the responsibility at-tached to all commanders under the historical doctrinerespondeat superior. Yamashita was hanged not becausehe ordered atrocities. Indeed, the evidence was thatGeneral Yamashita had little knowledge of the conduct ofhis forces at the time and even less control. He was hangedbecause of the clear application of the ethical principle thata commander is responsible for everything his men do orfail to do. This is a principle which has long been ap-plicable to American military custom and practice.

5. The important point here is that the refusal to execute anorder per se is not the end of the judgmental process.Whether in military or civilian society, that act is judged ata later time as to its acceptability or unacceptability. Thus,the willingness "to accept the consequences" of one's act ofrefusal is really a statement of readiness to justify one's ac-tions at some appropriate time. It is not an assumption of apriori guilt or of one's preparedness to accept summaryjustice on the spot.

Al4fred Kern

WAITING FOR EURIPIDES

RICHARD A. GABRIEL asserts that theAmerican military desperately needs a moralrenaissance. To "recover from the debacle of Viet-nam," the Army must "ensure that its officers developthe capacity to balance moral and career decisionsmore responsibly." To achieve this ethical imperative,Gabriel calls for the development of a doctrine ofmoral protest for use by the officer corps. He remindsus that within the British and French traditions, themilitary officer has not only the right but even theobligation "to resign over questions of honor." Notquite as afterthought, Gabriel observes that his fouravenues of protest are "legitimate in that they are con-sistent with the dominant values of the democraticpolity that the officer swears to serve."

Had he chosen to do so, Gabriel might havebased his argument wholly on the last point; i.e.,military officers have the legal right of moral protest

Alfred Kern is the author of novels, Made In USA, TheWidth of Water, and The Trial of Martin Ross. Nowretired, he was the Frederick F. Seely Professor of English atAilegheny Collee, Meadville, Pennsylvania, and a Distin-guished Visiting Professor at the US Air Force Academy,1970-80. Thi article is from the US Air Force AcademyJournal of Profesional Military Eftis, April 1960.

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120 Alfred Kern

because the dominant values of American democracyinsist that such rights be given. This argument, areflection of the views of Richard Hofstadter andother consensus historians, may be summarizedquickly. With starts and stops, periods of progressand reaction, the United States has moved steadilyforward in reaffirming the constitutional franchise.In the decisions of the Warren Court (Brown versusthe School Board, the Escobido and Miranda deci-sions), the civil rights provisions of the Constitu-tion -the Bill of Rights particularly - were con-clusively ruled to be enforceable law and not merelyan expression of national aspiration. As Justice HugoBlack declared at the time of the school desegregationorders, such rulings are not unwarranted judiciallegislation but constructionist decisions. Further-more, the shifts in public policy which anticipated thecivil rights decisions of the Warren Court and thepassage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 occurred atleast a generation earlier. If the Wagner Act excludedpublic employees from the right to collective bargain-ing, such employees have been included more recent-ly. And so, this argument goes, the undeniable tide ofAmerica's political destiny now washes up to includethe military. If not unionization, surely the military isentitled to a legitimate grievance procedure wherequestions of personal integrity are at issue.

Of course, counter-arguments can be made. Itmay be said that we already have such procedures inplace, that we don't need them, that in a combatsituation such procedures are unmanageable or im-possible, that "personal integrity" may become aeuphemism for politicizing the armed forces. For themoment, let us consider such counter-argument to beirrelevant. Suffice it to say that the consensusview -with all the precedent of the past fifty

Waiting for Euripides 121

years - provides sufficient cause. However, Gabrielmerely acknowledges that his proposals are consistentwith the values of American democracy, not that suchvalues are the first and best justification for thoseproposals.

Then, what is Gabriel about here? His essay im-presses me as being the post-war version of the anti-Vietnam position. If he compresses the causes to con-centrate on the cure, the diction which expresses thosecauses transcends argument to become lyric outcry:"Vietnam horrors, moral bankruptcy." Surely, theprincipal strength of the essay is to be found in thatcompressed passion, for Gabriel means exactly whathe is saying: the American military suffers frommoral bankruptcy brought about by its participationin Vietnam horrors, horrors caused and then com-pounded by careerism. Gabriel is urging the militaryto establish avenues of moral protest in response tothe causes as he states them. In short, the military isbeing exhorted to confess its crimes, the doctrine ofmoral protest becoming both prevention and cure aswell as an act of contrition. Such a diagnosis mustcommand us more than the doctor's prescription. IfGabriel is correct about the illness, his medicine is tooweak to heal us; a medic does not stick a band-aid onthe deepest shrapnel wounds.

As best I can tell, "careerism" has come to meanthe opposite of leadership. If George Patton andDouglas MacArthur were ambitious leaders, theywere not "careerists" in the current sense. A careeristis a square-filler, a time-server. His talents and im-agination have been circumscribed to performmanagerial duties. He evaluates personal and militaryoptions only for their consequences on his advance-ment. His goal is not service but full status retire-

122 Alfred NKn

ment. In Vietnam, he went along, refused or was in-capable of disagreement. But how far are we to pushthe idea of careerism in combat? Are we to believethat "body count" (killing to kill, the "assumption"that a dead Vietnamese was Viet Cong) was whollythe consequence of irresponsible careerism. Ironical-ly, to invoke careerism as a significant explanation ofVietnam horrors is what one might expect from thevery people Gabriel scorns as careerists. We shallnever transform our experience in Vietnam with suchover-simplifications.

Military careerism is the corporate-managerialmentality in uniform. Careerism is the capture andsubjugation of the mind and spirit by faceless andanonymous systems. Careerism is a psychologicalcondition induced by a feeling of individualhelplessness against technological/political bureau-cracy. Unfortunately, such careerism is now to befound everywhere -churches, universities, tradeunions, social service agencies, even BrownieTroops-and it is to be resisted. But unless fun-damental changes occur, Gabriel's program for moralprotest will become part of the system. Hence:"Moral Protest, Square One-How to Process DeeplyFelt Dissent."

If general officers did not resign in protestagainst political and/or military policy in Vietnam, isthere reason to believe they would have done so ifGabriel's apparatus had been in place? Examinedlogically, the question is not whether such officerscould have resigned but that they did not resign. Ihave no doubt that such a resignation would havebeen attended by newspaper headlines and television

6 interviews; I doubt if such resignations would havemade much difference. Indeed, to "legalize" the risk

I

Waitin, for Eudides 123

and passsion of individual dissent may be the bestway to kill it. From Antigone's moral defiance ofCreon's edicts to Martin Luther King's "Letters froma Birmdighamn Jail," we have learned that moral pro-test carries real power only when there are personalconsequences. Making such protest "legitimate willrender it less consequential and diminish its effec-tiveness.

If I am not enthusiastic about Gabriel's proposal,I am sympathetic to his concerns. He insists on con-fronting us again with the questions of Vietnam andcareerism, and we want people to do exactly that.However, we need to understand the questions morefully before we propose the answers. The causes andconsequences of Vietnam and careerism are deeperand more complicated than Gabriel's therapies. Forthe present, I prefer to live and wrestle with thosedensities, and I believe that is also what the countryshould do. Above all, I am wary of cosmetic surfacesto disguise internal disorders. To argue against anylegal reform is mindless, of course, but I am alsoresponding to Gabriel's essay as he wrote it.

Would it be foolish and romantic to suggest thatfinally it will be art that redeems us? A number ofyears ago at a meeting devoted to the literature of theHolocaust, I heard a woman -herself a survivor ofthe concentration camps and the only survivor I'veseen whose prison number was tattooed on herface - say that the only work which had touched herown experience was The Trojan Women. We needtime. We need tough-mindedness. We need to bechastened without the loss of personal and collectivecourage. We need to be admonished and advised bythe example of our own past conduct, but we need the

IN &W Afi.

wesh toacetanedMor n

waiting for Euripdes........

Philip A. Johnson

WHY DON'T WE FOLLOWTHE RULES?

B ASIC MILITARY TRAINING fulfills a vari-ety of administrative and substantive functions, all ofwhich contribute to the central purpose of transform-ing civilians into useful members of the military.Among all the various bits of vital knowledge thetrainee, officer candidate, or military service cadet ac-cumulates, it is forcefully brought to his or her atten-tion that 'it is wise to obey orders, rules, and regula-tions. This is frequently accomplished by forcefullyaccentuating the converse principle -that it is mostunwise to disobey. But the lesson is nevertheless effec-tively conveyed. The principles of duty, loyalty, andresponsibility, each of which has a large componentof obedience involved, are widely held to be amongthe highest virtues of military professionals. For thosemore motivated by the stick than by the carrot, theUniform Code of Military Justice holds out the

Colonel Philip A. Johnson, USAF, formerly AssociateProfessor, Department of Law, US Air Force Academy, iscurrently assigned to Headquarters, US Air Force,Europe, Office of the Staff Judge Advocate. This essay isreprinted from the US Air Force Academy Journal of Pro-fessional Military Ethics, September 1981.

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126 Phil4p A. Johnson

promise of a Dishonorable Discharge and up to fiveyears in the Armed Forces Disciplinary Barracks atFort Leavenworth for those who refuse to obey.

But there is not one among us who has servedany appreciable time in the armed forces without per-sonally witnessing numerous violations of publishedorders and regulations. I daresay we have not alwaysreported such violations. I would even venture to saythat in our day most of us have commited a few.

Many such violations are not particularly in-teresting, from the standpoint of ethical analysis. Wecan probably set aside clearly corrupt and venal actsthat are committed out of motives no more noblethan greed or malice. Persons who steal governmentequipment or vandalize property or falsify travelvouchers are best treated as common criminals whoseactions usually fail to appeal to any ethical base, nomatter how farfetched.

On the other hand, a type of disobedience thatmight provoke at least some debate about the ethicsinvolved concerns all those rules that are evadedbecause they seem to be patently absurd. These arethe requirements that appear to the actor to be theproducts of ignorance, politics, or empire-building,violations of which cause few pangs of consciencebecause the individual concerned perceives no signifi-cant connection between the requirement and the ef-fective accomplishment of any function or mission. Isuspect each of us would have our own favorite can-didates for inclusion in this category. If we sat downtogether and made a list of such things, the list mightinclude some of the following: flu shots; annualaerobics testing; minimum sorties, requirements forflying hours and touch-and-go landing practice forflying personnel; mandatory Professional Military

"hy Don't We Follow the Rules? 127

Education courses; prescribed exposure to Air ForceNow films; and required training on topics such as in-formation security, disaster preparedness, effectivewriting, the laws of armed conflict, supply pro-cedures, equipment policies, civilian personnel, drugand alcohol abuse, race relations, and conflicts ofinterest. Resistance to such "required" activities occa-sionally surfaces as noisy defiance, but it more fre-quently takes the form of sullen noncompliance,occasionally accompanied by the falsification ofrecords. Leaving aside the obvious issue of the actualmerit of each of these items, and assuming for argu-ment's sake that in a particular situation the policyinvolved seems to serve no useful purpose, I wouldsuggest that there still aren't many interesting ethicalquestions raised by these issues because the only costsof compliance are annoyance and each individual'stime. It would be very difficult to make out any kindof case that it would be unethical to comply; insteadyou hear it said that noncompliance is no big thing.Maybe so.

But a much more important ethical issue con-cerns particular requirements that violate a fun-damental right of some individual. For example,cadets at the service academies were required to attendchapel until 1972 when the federal courts decided thatcompulsory chapel attendance violated their rights ofreligious freedom guaranteed by the First Amend-ment. Similarly, by act of Congress military memberswho acquire religious or ethical beliefs inconsistentwith continued service in an armed force are excusedfrom fulfilling their active duty service obligations. Amember who is ethically opposed only to a certainwar or conflict is not similarly excused. And a seriesof court cases has reaffirmed the principle that the

128 PAI~p A. Jehmse

military's interest in the neat and wholesome ap-pearance of its uniformed members outweighs thepersonal liberty of service members to choose theirown hairstyle and otherwise to do their own thing.Also Air Force medical personnel are not generally re-quired to assist in performing therapeutic abortions ifthey have personal ethical objections to abortion.

Probably the most comforting thing that can besaid to commanders and supervisors about suchethical conflicts and questions is that they are normal-ly resolved at higher levels of authority, as in each ofthe examples mentioned in the paragraph above. Butnot always. I remember an incident in an Air ForceAcademy cadet dormitory a couple of years ago inwhich a number of cadets asked their Air OfficerCommander to order one of the members of thesquadron to stop coming around to their room todiscuss religion. The cadet in question felt a strongreligious obligation to share his beliefs with others,but the cadets he approached had various reasonswhy they wanted to be left alone. Balancing all thecompeting interests in a situation like this one is farfrom easy for anyone in authority. And what will wethink of the ethics of an individual who resists theorder of a superior telling him to cease and desist?

Another interesting problem area of ethical con-flict for military personnel concerns acts that violatesome military directive but are done out of loyalty toa family member. An example might be a person whofails to appear for work at the scheduled time, whothen calls in to report that he or she will be late or ab-sent because he or she is caring for a family memberwho is ill, or is dealing with some other familyemergency. Most supervisors are very understandingabout such situations, at least if they are convinced

WhY Don'V W. Fellow the Ruin?7 129

that the facts have been accurately reported to them.The authorization of emergency leave is based on anexplicit recognition that family obligations sometimesought to take precedence over what would otherwisebe a member's normal duties. The rub comes whenthere is a difference of opinion between a militaryperson and those in authority over him or her. Inoverseas areas there is a chronic problem withemergency leave because many persons' concepts oftheir extended family exceed the definition of"family" in the military regulation, and becausemembers' judgments of what constitutes an"emergency" requiring their presence fail to match upwith the authorized reasons for emergency leave listedin the regulation. In an overseas area, the result isusually a frustrated and angry soldier who canbecome a morale problem in the organization andprobably a poor performer. In the US itself, the resultis too often that the member simply goes AWOL. Inmy experience with numerous such cases in variousbase legal offices, the circumstances of the absencehave always been considered as a strong mitigatingfactor when imposing punishment, but they havenever been treated as a complete defense. And I don'targue that they should be, as a policy matter. What Iam suggesting is that a member caught between dutyto family and duty to the Air Force has an ethicalproblem of considerable dimension.

Loyalty to friends and co-workers seldom callsfor absence from the job, but it is frequently thereason for failing to report misconduct or even cir-cumstances that render people unfit for duty. Whatdoes a pilot do if he knows that another pilot in hissquadron has a problem with drug or alcohol abuse?What do you do when you see someone in your office

13E1 Phip A. Johnson

copy a personal item on the Xerox machine, or usegovernment paper and envelopes for personal letters?The approved solution is of course that your duty tothe Air Force requires a prompt report to someone inauthority. The reality is no one I have ever known hasalways complied with that policy. Most of us have ade minimus threshold -some things are too minor todo anything at all about them. If such incidents arerepeated, or become more serious, we may try to dealwith them by talking to the individual concerned.Only if things really get out of hand are most of us in-clined to make a formal report.

One of the possible reasons for this response is aconcern for the welfare of the person concernedwhich may outweigh one's sense of duty to thegovernment when it appears that the harm done iswholly insignificant. But there is another possiblereason for overlooking the minor improprieties of co-workers or other associates, one that I suggest ismuch more interesting from an ethical viewpoint.What I refer to is a judgment that "following thebook" may in fact do more harm than good to thesuccessful accomplishment of the organization's mis-sion. Personal loyalties aside, the commotion, resent-ment, and perhaps loss of one's own status or in-fluence that could be expected to result from a formalreport of trivial misconduct might be expected to be abigger threat to the organization than was the initialoffense. Of course, this argument might be said torest on a lack of confidence in the fair and judiciousoperation of the disciplinary system, and it will carrymuch more weight where the disciplinary system is infact regarded as arbitrary or overly harsh. But on theother hand some of these unpleasant results can beexpected to occur merely because one had the temerity

Why Don't We Fellow the Rules? 131

to fink on the guy next door. The argument is alsorather circular, since people are not likely to be upsetunless you violate an established and expected patternof behavior, and your decision will either contributeto or erode the existing pattern. On the other hand,you will normally be acting on a set range, with cer-tain expectations already in place, and you maydecide that the uproar you would cause is not worth-while.

The most interesting ethical problem in this area,it seems to me, is the situation where the very contentof rules and regulations seems to interfere with theproper accomplishment of one's mission. This mightoccur when the general purpose for which the ruleswere established seems less important than somethingunforeseen, or peculiar to your local situation, orraised by circumstances that have drastically changedsince the rule was announced. We are not talking nowabout noncompliance based upon personal conve-nience, personal liberty, personal loyalty, or anyother personal interest. I wish to suggest that disobe-dience sometimes occurs out of a selfless concern forwhat is in military circles usually regarded as ourultimate goal - accomplishment of the mission. I alsosuggest that in at least some of these cases disobe-dience may be the most ethical course of action.

I am going to give some examples of situationsthat seem to raise this issue. In some of them, most ofus would agree that the rules should have been follow-ed. In others, most of us might agree to the contrary.I think others might be the subject of considerabledebate.

1. About ten years ago a civilian employee at aflying base reported to higher headquarters that his

132 Phip A. Johnson

base commander had ordered him to put a largequantity of supplies and equipment into a ditch andbury them. These items had been acquired in variousways because they were regarded as essential to prop-er operations and maintenance. The problem wasthey were in excess of the supply and equipmentauthorizations established by higher headquarters. AsI heard the story, they were to be temporarily interredfor the duration of an outside inspection of the unit,and then be exhumed for continued service.

2. On a small scale, I was told by a former C- 130maintenance officer that it was a common practice byofficers responsible for theater maintenance to haveone or more engines "hidden away" (i.e., not listed onaccountability records) because the number ofengines authorized is insufficient to "keep 'em flying,"and because there are times when the paperwork re-quired to dispatch a replacement engine takes toolong.

3. The stories are legion of "padding" manpoweror workload surveys in order to acquire manning slotsor equipment that you know you probably can't getunder the established rules, but that are absolutelyessential to getting your unit's job done.

4. Procurement restrictions or delays aresometimes "finessed" by the use of devices such ascreative writing of specifications to justify a "single-source"' purchase, or by unauthorized purchasesfollowed by requests for ratification. When two ma-jors from the USAFA faculty were court-martialed afew years ago for falsifying travel vouchers, one oftheir explanations was that procurement of equip-ment repair services took so long that their researchprojects were constantly being interrupted. Theirsolution was to take the equipment downtown for im-

Why DonaY We Follow the Rules? 13

mediate repair at a civilian firm, pay for the repairsout of their private funds, and then to submit a phonytravel voucher to reimburse themselves. Had therenot been evidence of considerably greater thefts thancould be identified with "repair costs," they mightwell have been treated more leniently.

5. The "protective reaction" strikes against NorthVietnamese airfields that led to the demotion andretirement of General Lavelle, Seventh Air ForceCommander, appear to have been conducted in de-fiance of orders from higher headquarters becausethey were considered to be important in prosecutingthe war effort. There is still a lively argument as towhether the published accounts are accurate, butassuming that they are reliable this senior officer risk-ed his career and reputation because he felt the ordershe had been given obstructed the accomplishment ofhis mission.

6. What does one do with captured enemyprisoners? The various treaties on the conduct ofarmed conflict and the regulations that implement thetreaties all require that prisoners be treated humanely.Even if you suspect that a prisoner has highly usefulintelligence information you may not legally use forceor threats to persuade him to talk. It is welldocumented from several wars that occasionally on-scene commanders have chosen to pursue their im-mediate mission by abusing prisoners to gainintelligence information. Ever hear of helicopterinterrogation?

7. What if you are a physician who learns from apatient that he has a drinking problem? If the patientis on flying status or is performing duties covered bythe Personnel Reliability Program you may have animmediate duty to make the problem known to the

134 Philip A. Johnson

proper authorities. But if you report it, you will pro-bably have lost all effectiveness in helping that personsolve his problem, and if word gets around that whatyou tell the doctor will get right back to yourcommander, you are unlikely to ever hear such con-fidences from anyone again. No privilege of con-fidentiality is officially recognized in this situation,but confidentiality is regarded as so important bymost physicians that they practice it anyway, andmost commanders are quite willing to leave it to thephysicians involved to decide when the danger toothers or to the mission justifies disclosure.

8. There are a wide variety of prescribedclassroom procedures for academic classes at the AirForce Academy. Most faculty readers of this com-ment will admit that virtually no instructor followsthem all, even though they are formally decreed bythe Dean in Faculty Operating Instructions. When Ifirst arrived as an instructor, compliance wasuniformly good concerning the requirement thatcadets must leave all outerwear on the hooks outsidethe classrooms. Then four years ago we quit heatingthe classrooms to a habitable temperature, and mostinstructors started granting requests by cadets to weartheir jackets in class. I don't think the cadets are evenasking anymore, and most instructors totally ignorethe wear of outerwear in class. Some standardsaround the Air Force Academy have slipped becauseof sloth and inattention. This one has died becauseyou can't conduct class properly when the studentsare physically uncomfortable.

There is a constant quest at the Academy to finda way to get the cadets to obey regulations. A cor-ollary to this concerns how to get cadets - particularlythose in the chain of command-to report violations

Why Don't We Follow the Rules? 135

by others. There is, of course, no simple answer, andthe reasons for violating a regulation, or fortolerating a violation by another, may range all theway from corrupt venality, to peer pressure, disagree-ment with the purpose or premise of the requirement,personal loyalty to other cadets, fear of retribution,general indifference, belief that the rule infringes im-portant liberties, or a judgement that the squadron orwing runs much better when the rule is disregarded. Ihave heard this last position argued by cadets mostoften with regard to the prohibition of "unduefamiliarity," including the use of first names, betweenupperclass cadets and doolies before recognition.Some other causes I have heard championed havebeen ribald pranks and pep rallies to build morale,and the use of "positive leadership," which is the op-posite of "Form 10 leadership." I cannot help butthink that we as an institution contribute to confusionin this area as long as we applaud certain pranks and"spirit missions," and as long as various instructorsand AOCs demonstrate quite inconsistent styles ofleadership. I have confidence that most cadets willsurvive the process, and that they are mature enoughby graduation to select the most useful theories andstyles from among their experiences. I also suggestthat we ought not to be overly anxious to brand in-dividuals as bad people the first few times they stum-ble in the rather complex process of working it all out.

I am well aware that when a superior and asubordinate have a good-faith disagreement about apolicy question, the approved solution is that thesuperior must be presumed to be the wiser. There aregood reasons for this presumption, not the least ofwhich is the broader experience and perspective of

li6 Philip A. Johnson

the superior. For example, in dealing with an enemyprisoner the personnel on the scene may not pause toreflect on the consequences that their mistreatment ofhim may have when members of their own force arecaptured by the enemy. They might not appreciate theimpact it would have on our nation's relationshipswith neutral nations if it became known that ourforces had committed a war crime, and they mightnot foresee that an incident might so embitter theenemy that the process of negotiating a settlement ofthe conflict would be made more difficult. Theymight also fail to appreciate the possible conse-quences for the morale and discipline of our owntroops, and the effects of such incidents on publicsupport at home for the war effort.

Much the same can be said for the necessity ofcentralized decision-making in the allocation ofresources such as supplies, equipment, and man-power. While one unit may know precisely how itsmission suffers from the stinginess of higher head-quarters, it is not in a position to know if someoneelse may be in an even worse position, or when some-one else's problem may be a bigger factor in achievingthe overall mission.

But there are times when the head-sheds seem tostretch this presumption to the breaking point, andbeyond: "Those guys writing the regs just didn'tforesee this pecular situation, and furthermore theproblem has changed."

Of course the answer to that argument is that thesystem is designed to grant exemptions, where ap-propriate, and that policies can always be changed toaccommodate new .circumstances. To which theanswer frequently is: "I'm trying to fly airplanes outhere-I don't have time to write staff papers." And

Why Don'V We Fellow the Rules? 137

delay aside, it is an unfortunate fact that many fieldcommanders have a certain lack of confidence inheadquarters types, particularly when the odor ofpolitics or press-agentry hangs over an issue.Sometimes it seems more useful to go ahead and dowhat needs to be done rather than waiting for a ra-tional decision from on high.

Assuming you agree with the central premise ofall this (which is, in case you missed it, There are oc-casions when disobedience may be more ethical thanobedience) the question arises of what to do inspecific cases? One is tempted to rejoin thatknowledge is its own reward, but let me suggest somemore useful derivatives of this point as well.

Persons who issue directives can reduce the prob-lem and manage more effectively at the same time ifthey conscientiously review their directives regularly,looking at each for effectiveness and currency.Policy-making should be delegated as far down thechain of command as possible to permit accommoda-tion to local conditions. The reasons for controversialpolicies should be carefully articulated and publi-cized. I know this last statement will raise hackles onevery commander or supervisor who ferventlybelieves that his troops should do what he says, justbecause he says so. The fact, alas, is that they won't,especially if their confidence in him ever flags.

Individuals who are considering violating somedirective have the responsibility to examine theirmotives closely. It is far too easy to rationalize one'sactions in the noblest of terms when you really did itfor personal convenience. I suggest also that we oughtto grant superiors some presumption of rationality,and that we should be willing to accept that there maybe reasons for what they do that are not immediately

138 Philt A. Johnson

apparent to us. The treatment of a prisoner of war issuggested as an example. As faculty members arewont to tell students who complain about core cur-riculum, requirements, "You don't know what youdon't know."

And, finally, what conclusions should be drawnfor the handling of incidents where disobedience isdetected? Perhaps simply that we ought to take thetime to explore the offender's motives. We are notlikely to conclude in many cases that a medal shouldbe awarded, but the motivation of the individual maybe the most important factor in choosing a rationalplan for correction and improvement, both for the in-dividual and for the policy that was challenged.

Wfllam A. Waflsch

THE ETHICS OF THEELECTRONIC REVOLUTION:IMPLICATIONS FOR THEUS AIR FORCE

IN PUBLICATION AFTER PUBLICATION I'veread papers that sing the praises of the "electronicrevolution." This isn't one of them. As a matter of

) fact, it's intended to be a warning. It's a warning thatapplies as much to military professionals as to anyoneelse dealing with the modern electronic media.

Now I know about all the advantages this revolu-tion offers for education. Advanced communicationtechnology can help greatly with our energy pro-blems, for example. Through teleconferencing ex-ecutives need not travel thousands of miles. They canmerely tie their conference tables together with asatellite and - presto - they're face-to-face with eachother. With an electronic blackboard, teletext, orvideotext, they can pass printed information, too.

Lieutenant Colonel William J. Wallisch, USAF, nowretired, was Associate Professor of English, Director ofMedia Instruction, and Assistant to the Dean of Faculty atthe US Air Force Academy. This essay is from the US AirForce Academy Journal of Professional Military Ethics,November 1980.

149 Wilh~m A Waghch

And recent research in fiber optics technologyalso holds great promise. This cheap replacement forall the copper cable currently used in communicationsystems will permit us to tie much informationtogether at a fraction of the cost of cable and witheven better technical results.

Satellite commnunication systems and fiber cablewill eventually tie our homes together also. We'll seethe demise of the major networks and cable will beking. QUBE television, that experiment of interactivetelevision now being conducted in Columbus, Ohio,is the prototype of home entertainment in the future,a technology that will offer practically unlimidted pro-gram choices for viewers. And we'll be able to talkback and make our thoughts known to the people inthe studio. All this is interesting.

The impact of this new technology on educationwill also be great. We will be able to dial up ProfessorSo-and-So at MIT or Cal Tech and take the bestcourse in the country without leaving our homes. Thecourse exam will be part of the electronic package.From grade school to graduate school going to cam-pus might really become passt.

Every American home will have a computer inthe future. The video display screen, the computer,and the audio communication system will be a dreampackage that promises to free us of travel to thesupermarket or bother about balancing ourcheckbook. We, too, will be able to see the personwere calling on the phone.

Cable television companies already bring thelatest movies to living rooms across America andvideo disc technology offers still other possibilities forhome entertainment and education. More courses,

The Ethic of thme Eletreni Rewihaiea 141

old movies, new movies, and unlimited packages ofsight and sound will be available in disc form to theaverage American at reasonable costs.

Well, so far, this essay does sound like one ofthose editorials promoting the wonders of electronictechnology in the future. And it also sounds like oneof my lectures on modern media. Every year I add tothe list of wonders I tell the students about in mytelevision class. And they dutifully write their papersextolling the new media horizons. We even try to im-itate some of these futuristic programs on our ownstudent-run program at the Air Force Academy, theBlue Tube.

But lately I find my lectures contain a sort ofchilly warning. And the student papers, too, seem abit sour, even though they still stand in awe of whatmight be possible through electronic technology.

What's going wrong? Nothing really. Nothing'shappened yet. But we have begun thinking aboutwhat could happen if the managers of that newtechnology don't take just a moment to think aboutall the implications of their new equipment. We knowthey have given the circuit design of this technologycareful thought, and the cost analyses are expert. Butwe've begun to wonder if they've thought about theconsequences of all their planning.

For example. If QUBE television asks questionsof its household viewers each night before they beginto use the "Touch Now" response button, what willthe television station do with all that statistical infor-mation it gathers? I mean the "how many people arethere with us," "how many men and how manywomen," and "what are your ages" kinds of questionseventually will yield quite a significant data bank ofinformation. And if the computer knows who's

142 IIbn J. WeiANch

watching and what they watched - well, it's going tolearn a lot about those peoples tastes and habits. Itcan record votes for this and that; it can evaluate andrecord trends.

And if we sit more in front of the TV screens anddisplays in the future, we might walk less into eachother's lives. Not that passing each other in metalboxes on the highways is all that great, but I wouldn'twant anything to replace getting outside and meetingpeople. It would be too bad, really, if our young peo-ple don't get on campus sometime, even though betterlectures "might" be possible at home over the newelectronic system.

While thinking of this subject recently I wasreminded of the last pages of Ray Bradbury's sciencefiction novel Fahrenheit 451. In that book everyonehas at least a wall or two of what might be calledtelevision. The TV was holographic and even interac-tive if one had enough cash. Imagine that soap operacharacters could be right with you in full size in yourhome and could even turn and ask your opinion.Despite wars that might rage outside, would people inthe future come to believe that "reality" is what theTV screen consists of, that action is only there?

Marshall McLuhan argued a few years ago thatthe old medium will always be the first content of thenew one. I really understood that idea one day at theAir Force Academy Library when I gazed downthrough a glass case at a Gutenberg Bible. TheGutenberg was a printed replica of the kind themonks had so lovingly and laboriously created byhand. The new medium had taken the old hand doneBible as its content. Then the movies took novels forcontent. Finally, TV took movies as content.McLuhan may have been right.

The EMhks of the Eletronic Revoluion 143

But throughout history, in all media that havecome down through the ages, a common content hasbeen maintained - content consisting of symbols thatI deal with human life. As a kid I used to love to pressmy ear to a radio speaker in the night and listen tofar-off places. I was supposed to be sleeping, but in-stead I was listening to all those voices. It seemed likepeople carried on their conversations for anyone whowould listen, regardless of the hour. Though most ofus slept, we could be reassured of the fact that ourspecies was talking on the airwaves, not ever giving upthe reins of a sleeping world.

And the other day in one of my classes it occur-red to the students that the ultimate content of mediahas always been us, the human beings who wrote thewords, the stories, and the songs that fill the books,the airwaves, and the screens. We are the content ofthe old medium, and whatever new medium theremight be.

Before we step into four walls of electronic magicas Ray Bradbury prophesies, a magic that holds suchunlimited potential, I think we'd better make surewe're not going to step into an electronic nightmare.Because we are and always have been the ultimatecontent of our media, let's make sure we finally arenot consumed by it. We must make sure that we cantell the difference between the electronic charactersand ourselves. I don't want to be caught up in an elec-tronic hall of mirrors and not be able to find my wayout, bumping into electronic mirror images of myselfeach time I try to find the exit to real life.

From a holographic image I am not going to getlove, compassion, and understanding. I'll get an im-age as cold as the mirror's surface. And even though Ican talk back or press my console, what or who will I

144 WIU1wn A. Wa~lah

be talking with? A programmed voice? And if I canvote for an issue or a public official, will my vote belater "reported" to someone? Will I be reminded thatI didn't watch when I should have? Don't forget, thecomputer knows when we aren't watching too.

I said nothing's happened yet. Maybe it has atthat. We may see some warning signals already. Thereare roughly 146 million television sets in America.Half of us own two sets, as a matter of fact. And wewatch those screens on the average of 45 hours aweek. That's a lot of sets, a lot of time devoted towatching them.

I know the printed word has caused kings andpopes alike to react with outrage; heads have rolledbecause the printed medium dared make its point.That print has had a dramatic impact upon human-kind is an understatement. Movies, too, havechanged opinion and created perceptions about ourvery way of life. Radio has had considerable in-fluence. Each medium has made its mark and takenits toll in terms of influence and perception.

But it seems somehow that TV has an appetitefor its content like no other media. Researchers willtell you that television's early appetite for boxingnearly destroyed that sport. More recently we've seenpolitical candidates eaten alive by the cameras.Senator Muskie cried on the screen in 1972 and lostany hope of a serious presidential candidacy. Otherpoliticians have been defeated also because of a singlemedia slip.

The recent ABSCAM affair brought about theexpulsion of a Congressman, something that has onlyrarely happened in the history of congressional cen-sorship. Did that have anything to do with the factthat Congressman Meyers was video-taped taking a

The Ethics of the Eleiiwdc Rmvdloi 145

bribe? Ted Koppel of ABC's Nightline thought so,and even asked that question of a member of theCongressional Ethics Committee. And we watched allof it on TV. We have now even seen the Meyers tapeon prime time news programs.

The television audience has been subjected toshattering visual stimuli. Wars, assassinations, and ahost of terrible images-both real and makebelieve - have shocked and numbed the Americanpsyche. I can't help but think that a lot of this contenthas had a less than healthy effect. TV eats at us, itscontent. It almost demands human sacrifice, even in-cluding the fall of presidents. I don't think any othermedia have been quite this ravenous.

Our television journalists seem to accept anymedia event that comes in their direction. Compactand photogenic, the captured US Embassy in Iranwas a perfect place to set up cameras and "roil 'em."The cast of characters was confined to a small areaand there was plenty of action (demonstrations,organized self-flagellation sessions, speeches, andprison drama) for prime time viewing in America.

Hollywood would have constructed an "Iranianset" just that way. The Embassy provided not only ac-tion itself, but was the perfect backdrop for the mobscenes. Lighting was perfect during the daytime andthe set was easily lighted when there was an event"programmed" for the evening hours. The show atthe Embassy drew and held every major Americannetwork, not to mention a score of international presspeople.

I well remember the night I was watching one ofour network reporters doing a stand-up in front ofthe Embassy set and, almost as if he were making adiscovery on the spot, he said something to the effect

146 William J. Waffisch

that, "Just around the corner, Tehran is business asusual." And that was so. He even moved a cameraaround the corner from the Embassy and, sureenough, traffic and life were calm and ordered. Onlyat the set were things buzzing and tense. Howremarkable! Tehran itself was "business as usual."Our correspondent was intrigued by that. There maybe an important lesson in that perception for ourjournalists.

We need a crop of reporters who can makecritical judgements about truth and "reality." Arnaudde Borchigrave and Robert Moss recently wrote abook called The Spike. The book is a fictional ac-count of how Western journalists art manipulated bythe KGB. Such a "fiction" is believable in an agewhere manipulation of information is a major in-dustry. The new electronic journalist must be as alertfor such manipulation as he has been in protecting hisFirst Amendment rights. What he reports -nightafter night - will be interpreted as truth and reality.Training in how to separate manipulation from truthis something that must start in a reporter's first repor-ting class. Otherwise we'll have four networks: CBS,ABC, NBC, and KGB.

Our news people in Iran came off as naive, gulli-ble, and willing dupes of any "event." The finaloutrage was the display of charred American bodiesbrought out for the willing, humming cameras,brought right into our living rooms with little regardfor taste and decency. Our news people participatedin the worst kind of media event.

We need a crop of reporters who can make storyjudgments and base those judgments on principles oftaste. True, Hustler magazine is available in the worldof print, but let the consumer choose it. It isn't

The Ethics of the Electronic Revolutdon 147

all of a sudden thrown into his living room faster thanhe can switch the dial. You can control what yourchildren will read with more success than you canwhat the networks will deem suitable for prime time.

It's true that freedom of the press is one of ourmost cherished possessions in American democracy.But does that mean that there can never be just onemoment when those behind the cameras might givesome thought to what they're taping and photo-graphing? In order to protect the freedom of thepress, do we absolutely make no judgment at allabout what's being done before the camera? Do webroadcast everything just so we can't be accused ofbeing controlled?

I read lately in the pages of The Chronicle ofHigher Education and other publications thatAmerican industry is requesting more college-levelcourses in ethics. I submit that the viewing audiencemust demand those same courses for its journalists.That's the missing portion of the mass media cur-riculum today. Journalists must be trained in makingjudgments about what they'll air and who they'll ex-pose. They must become more skilled in the art of notbeing manipulated and used by the subjects of thecover story. Similarly, American news broadcastslack a certain sense of taste and editorial discretion.No matter how disgusting, a scene will often be in-cluded because the producers felt that the news valuefar outweighed the gory details. Maybe so. Maybe so.

I think it is time for electronic journalism toadopt a serious code of ethical standards. There is in-deed an NAB Code of Conduct, but this code is a farcry from anything approaching tough standards.And, yes, let the standards be developed from withinthe profession and not by outside vigilante groupspressing their own morality. Let the profession police

145 Wi~iam J. Waftch

and censor itself as do lawyers and physicians. Let itbe "professional" electronic journalism, backed up bya tough set of contextual and procedural standards.Let that profession "give no deadly medicine" to itsaudience. The discussion about such a code couldstart in the classroom, with support from the profes-sion and the large networks who broadcast news, in-formation, and features over the most fabulous elec-tronic communications network ever constructed.

Some wise old sage once said that one shouldnever get into an argument with the guy who buys inkby the barrel. So it is, I suppose, that one could makea similar argument that it's unwise to get into a fightwith someone who owns the airwaves, or buys, sells,and owns prime time like it were so much feed andgrain. There is only one problem with this notion: theairwaves are owned by the public. Despite that fact ithas seemed for many years that the networks ownedthe airways for use as a profit-making monopoly.

Electronic news gathering starts with a portablecamera, a crew, and a reporter going into the field.This news-gathering team will interview a subject orsit in the audience of a speech or witness some kind ofevent that happens in the world. That interview orevent may very well take an hour or more, butbecause of tight formats the story itself may actuallyonly last for 15-30 seconds on the six o'clock news.What happens between the time the shooting sessionis over and the segment is presented on the air is calledthe editing session. This is simply a time when thereporter comes back and rolls the tape and the filmmaking extensive cuts so that it can be made into acompact story for broadcast between commercialmessages. You've heard of the face on the cuttingroom floor. Editing is where the cut happens.

The Ethics of the Eletronic Revolution 149

The trouble with this industry practice is that au-diences aren't always sophisticated enough to thinkabout those edits that are made in the back rooms ofthe studio. Many a politician, military leader, busi-ness executive, and media personality has sat in frontof the scre~en and gasped at the result of the editor'scuts. "That s not what I said at all," is an often heardliving room disclaimer. It's time for the industry tothink about those edits. They can create another reali-ty, something different from what actually went on.Military leaders must deal with the realities of newsreporting, or find themselves helpless in front of thecamera. It's not possible to "create" favorablecoverage in these times; things were even worse dur-ing the Vietnam era. But our top leadership and ourpublic affairs people must continue to deal with themedia in an open way. Gone are the days of "pressagentry." As a matter of fact, I almost think com-manders are better off dealing directly with reporters,rather than creating the impression that they're put-ting a "flack" between themselves and the media.

We have been training our people in such areasas communication and human relations for yearsnow. Professional military training courses, such asSquadron Officer School, Air Command and StaffCollege, and the Air War College, include largeblocks of instruction on dealing with audiences andthe skills of communication in general. For example,OTS, ROTC, and the military academies train cadetsintensively in the communicative arts. Why not takeadvantage of that and let our military leaders do theirown talking for a change?

In 1456 Gutenberg's press made mass literacypossible. This was the medium that enabled thehuman race to take giant steps in terms of education,

150 Wllam J. Wallh

information, and social advancement. Not since thatremarkable milestone has such an equal opportunitybeen possible. The electronic revolution offers asimilar opportunity. But the potential for massmanipulation of information looms as well. Thosewho used print introduced the novel, the text book,the dictionary. Great libraries were establishedeverywhere written by the finest minds of each age.There was pulp, too -lots of it. But everywhere therewas substance to check the writings of fools andknaves.

Substance! That is the key to learning, to worth-while media content. I'm afraid that so much oftelevision today lacks that key element that it mightbecome nothing more than pulp and meaningless"electronic leaflets." Just observe the content andlength of major news items and then for the fun of itsee how much of that 30-minute news show is devotedto sports. Just think: everything that happened in theworld today in a 30-minute package. But, is it the"real world"?

I'm excited about the electronic revolution.Television has been my preoccupation for years. I'veproduced television. I teach television. I watch televi-sion. I teach a course in mass communication that ac-tually produces its own seven-minute news andfeature program shown over a collegiate closed-circuit TV system. Students learn scripting, reporting,on-camera performance, and all of the studiotechnical positions that actually put a program on theair. It's typical of hundreds of other media coursesfound in American higher education.

But beyond all of this, I'm convinced there mustbe more to such a course. My students sense that, too.Lately on network TV I'm convinced by the con-

The Ethics of the Electronic Revolution 151

tent of our entertainment and news programs that lit-tle attention has been paid to the ethics of journalism.As a teacher, a media scholar, I'm worried. Mystudents, too, are worried.

I'm proposing that we start with the curriculum.I know that there is at least one course devoted toethical concerns, but there must be more. Deep con-cern for things like taste and propriety must be builtinto editing courses. A respect for privacy must be apart of news gathering and interviewing training, and,most of all, substantive content must be seen as thebackbone of every lead story.

In fact, the mass media curriculum is in a state ofunbalance. Technology is running away with our elec-tronic journalism. Cameras, switchers, audio con-soles, lighting grids, editors, electronic graphics, andthe engineers and technicians who put it all togetherreally do their part far better than those who providemedia content. American television and movies arebeautifully done - technically. Too often the tape andcelluloid are tied to a script devoid of substance.

At a minimum, I think it's time for newspeopleand the schools of electronic journalism to rethinkthe concept of reporting over the television medium.That it is a powerful instrument of information goeswithout saying. That it can therefore broadcastwhatever it deems necessary is not a foregone conclu-sion. Like the person who continues to achieve hiswill because he is allowed to say whatever comes tohis mind, so should American audiences finally tire atsuch presumptuous behavior. The gore of selectedVietnam footage, live assassinations, and the scenesof American bodies displayed in Iran might tell usthat we've had enough manufactured "realism" for awhile.

152 WIlim J. Waillch

A lot of current programming is probably donewithout either malice or deliberate forethought. It'snot a case of premeditated murder. Rather, it may bea case of simplistic and naive, unsophisticated jour-nalism. And a stronger medium-four walls of in-teractive holographic image tied to a com-puter-hods open the possibility of more manipula-tion of information and lasting damage to the publicmind.

My students at the Air Force Academy haveevidenced an increasing discomfort with commercialTV lately. We're still reading the glowing editorialsabout media technology and the future. And we'rejust as excited as those authors are about the potentialthat fiber optic technology, satellites, cable TV,HBO, video discs, and teletext, computers, tele-conferences, and digital technology hold for civ-ilization. But we're also becoming increasingly skep-tical. We know the new technology is going to arrivesoon. We can't wait until theres a QUBE-like systemhere in our town. But we're going to be watchful.

The American military shouldn't escape a criticalanalysis either. The huge American Forces Network isjust as sophisticated and well equipped as its commer-cial counterparts. Moreover, it has a captive audiencein overseas areas where there are no other English-speaking broadcasts. It provides news and informa-tion over both radio and television, using commercialprograms to ill up the time it has not programmedfor.

So it is, then, that public affairs officers andmilitary broadcast specialists face the same kind ofresponsibility in terms of taste and content. Not onlydo they pass on the sins of the network producers("This program is being made available for our armed

Thm Ethic of do* Elect~w* Revolutbm 153

forces. .. ."), but they also face an oranzaioareality which insists upon the sponsor (Uncle Sam) be-ing put into the best light possible.

And yet fair's fair. American Forces RadioTelevision Service (AFRTS), for all its size andsophistication, is, nonetheless, a house organ. Butthat doesn't let its managers, producers, writers,technicians, and commanders off the hook of moralresponsibility. It only requires extra responsibility tonot manipulate its captive audience. Military com-manders and broadcasters can achieve quality serviceover AFRTS by constant attention to sound ethicalprogramming and content selection.

such practice must start at Fort Benjamin Har-rison, Indiana, the home of the Defense informationSchool. And it a so shoulId start at the three Americanmilitary academies in the classrooms where futurecommanders are educated. Those commanders andmilitary leaders will eventually have life and deathcontrol over armed forces broadcasting content. The"Blue Tubers" at the Air Force Academy, at least, areone group that has had the opportunity to think outbeforehand the responsibility they will have as profes-sional military media managers.

I think the communications teacher has a respon-sibility to put a chill into the air of the classroom.students, too, have the responsibility to stand backand carefully examine the implications of the newtechnology. These students will become the managersof these new media systems. It is essential that they doso with a deep concern for human Privacy, goodtaste, and commonsense reporting.

And while were talking about the curriculum,let's not forget those who wil be the engineers, the ex-ecutives, and the managers of the new technologies.

154 WMhasJ. Wailbh

Beyond the news report, these people will be thekeepers of the QUBE-like data bases. They will con-trol the content, policy, and direction of program-ming. They will engineer the new systems that will tiethe world together creating that "Global Village"McLuhan once talked about. Vested in them will bethe trust that the village will not be manipulated bythe electronic wonders that have the potential to bringhumankind closer together.

And all of that technology is firmly implanted inthe armed forces. We have a television network; wehave the computers. Someday AFRTS will have aQUBE-like system. And like big business, our mili-tary bases will have a cable system that will allowleadership to transmit information via TV sets locatedright in work areas. At this writing, as a matter offact, the Dean of the Faculty at the Air ForceAcademy is testing such a network that ties all depart-ments and staff agencies together for video an-nouncements. Blue Tube already broadcasts itsmessage to cadets over a closed circuit system thatconnects some 350 classrooms with video distribu-tion, and Air Force installations like McGuire AFB,New Jersey, have had cable TV for years.

That the Air Force -the US military -will beheavily involved in the electronic revolution of thefuture is obvious. We thrive on communication. No,we depend upon it. It can mean the difference betweenvictory or defeat. But with all of this technology willcome the same dangers, the same pitfalls that facecommercial public media. And the temptation to takeadvantage of such a captive audience will always bethere. Similarly, command and control at the highestlevels has the potential to overcontrol the military itselfif it is not careful, and objective!

WARA ANDMORALITY

Va

Noel Gayler

NUCLEAR DETERRENCE -

ITS MORAL AND POLITICALIMPLICATIONS

WHAT ARE MILITARY ETHICS, and whatis morality as it is applied to the profession of arms?I'm reminded that, as in many other things, there is acurious linkage, as well as an antithesis, betweenmorality and pornography. Both of them are extraor-dinarily difficult to define, but you know them whenyou see them. In that spirit I'm going to talk a little bitabout the military world as I think it should be, themilitary world as I have observed it, and then theethical problems -some very real and very seriousones-that will confront you if you aspire, as I hope

Admiral Gayler, in his 45 years in the US Navy, served asCINCPAC, Director of the National Security Agency, andas Deputy Director of the Joint Strategic Target PlanningStaff. This paper is from a talk given at the USAFAcademy in May 1983, as a Distinguished Speakers Pro-gramn presentation. An earlier version was presented at theNational Defense University, Fifth Joint Services Con-ference on Professional Ethics, January 1983. Reprintedfrom the US Air Force Academy Journal of ProfessionalMilitary Ethics, August 1983.

157

158 Noel Gayler

you all do, to leadership. Anybody who aspires toleadership, I can promise you, will sooner or laterhave to deal with some tough ethical questions, ques-tions where there will be no manual, no mentor, noold instructor, no one to whom you can go forcounsel except your own thought, your own reasonsand your own feeling.

I came from a Navy family. As a young officer Iwas quite content with the idea that serving the USNavy to the best of my ability was all I ever had to do.I could really not see any ethical problem ever comingup if I simply served as well as I could. Nowadayspeople are faced with far more ambiguous choices.When I was the skipper of the Ranger and we wentinto San Francisco Harbor, I always had the crew ondeck formed up to spell out "Power for Peace." Iserved very proudly with, though not in, the StrategicAir Command, and their motto, that I remember sowell, was "Peace is our Profession." We have to makesure that these and like slogans are a reality.

Now there's a place for power in the world.There's a place for resistance to expansionism, and aplace for coercion under military threat or by actualuse of military arms. There are great powers and thereare smaller ones which, if not constrained by otherpowers, will in fact subjugate their neighbors if theyget a chance. They must be contained; they must berestrained and they must be educated, if you will,possibly in the school of hard knocks, to make surethat the freedoms we value are protected. We do havevalid, vital foreign policy and military objectives, andit's our responsibility to be able to carry these out.Coercion, for these purposes, is valid and ethical. Itkeeps us free. Deterrence is valid and ethical. If wedesign our forces so that it's insane to come against us

Nucl ar Deterrec 159

because of the strengths we have - for that and nomore, not for aggression-then we are doingsomething which is valid and in which we can takepride. But punishment is not a valid idea. Neither isrevenge.

I want to see the United States continue to be thenumber one power in the world, in military strengthas well as wisdom and economy. I'm sure we all sharethat feeling. I think being number one is in the in-terests of this country and the world because we arethe only power that is both great and free. There aregreat powers and there are free powers. But we are theonly country with both, and we have a special respon-sibility before the world for that reason. And for thatvery same reason there are limits in this modern worldto the destructiveness we can plan for, let alone use,and to the validity of the targets we might use on acontingency basis. We must not be coerced bytechnology, by so-called requirements, by custom orby precedent-the terrible precedent of the destruc-tion of whole cities in World War Two, for example.The plans that we make in peace must reflect theseprinciples. We must not plan or design for militaryactions which don't meet the standards of the UnitedStates. Our operations in war must have ethicalrestraints which go far beyond observing rules aboutprisoners and noncombatants. They must be based onthe deepest springs of the ethical way in which we de-fend ourselves and those who trust and rely on us inthe interest of freedom and peace, without crossingthat borderline into methods unacceptable to civilizedpeople.

It is our professional responsibility to prepare forwar, but that is now made extraordinarily difficult.War is no longer properly considered an extension of

160 Noel GayWe

policy. Einstein said we have to change our way ofthinking, and he was correct. We in the military, par-ticularly, have to change our way of thinking. Wemust be effective in the service of the United Statesand its allies or we will have failed to do our duty. Wemust be humane or we will have failed humanity.How do we reconcile these demands? The only possi-ble way to reconcile them is through alert profes-sionalism. Officers today have totally unprecedentedresponsibilities. For example, during the CubanMissile Crisis, when the world was really threatenedwith nuclear war, professionalism on the diplomatic,the political, and particularly the military side was ex-traordinary. The fact was that, while the nuclearbalance was perceived to be near enough so thatneither side was deterred, the outcome was deter-mined by the capabilities of the Navy and the AirForce and the potential capabilities of the Army andMarines in that theater of operations.

Now let me talk about something very muchbefore us at the present moment: NATO and thedefense of Europe. Those of you who know landcombat, those of you who have served in NATO,know some of the extreme disadvantages we face withrespect to the armies of the Warsaw Pact. They'redeployed forward and they're well armed. They'reheavy in armor and skilled in combined arms tactics.To defend we have an alliance of fourteen nationsunder severe political and economic constraints. Formany years we have yielded to the temptation to say,rightly or wrongly, that we can make up for ourshortages and defend NATO countries with a first useof tactical nuclear weapons. Let's see what that im-plies. It implies, first, that the noncombatants whowould surely be killed in their thousands, their tens of

Nuclear Deterrence 161

thousands, maybe their hundreds of thousands,would be mostly German. That might deter thealliance at the outside. If not, the danger of escalationto total war would be very great. The USSR does notrecognize the concept of limited nuclear war. Theyhave said, explicitly, that if they get attacked withnuclear weapons they're going to come back in kindat a much higher level. The question will only be howfast the escalation takes place; whether it's one step,two steps, or three. Even if escalation to total nuclearwar doesn't take place, we would still be the loser in alimited tactical nuclear exchange for the simplereason that we have a much smaller number of farmore critical targets- airfields, ports, depots,assembly points-than the USSR and the WarsawPact. So the policy is a loser.

Now what has this got to do with ethics? It hasthis to do with ethics: military professionalism hasalready figured out how to defend Europe, withoutresorting to nuclear weapons, through such things asprepared defenses, coherent logistics support, aircommand and control, heavy anti-tank weapons,control of information, electronic warfare and in-telligence. All these things we know how to get andhow to do, and it is our collective responsibility to seethey are brought into being.

Finally, in terms of the military usefulness ofnuclear weapons, let's look at some examples, such asthe Falkland Islands. Nobody doubts that Great Brit-ain could have destroyed a dozen Argentine cities,including Buenos Aires, in a single blow. Obviouslythe British never considered such a thing althoughthey have nuclear weapons and the Argentines donot. Those constraints, and like ones against gas,bacteria and many other things which science has made

162 Noel Gaykvr

available, must continue to obtain if we are going toremain civilized people. So we've got to be able tofigure out how to do our jobs without resorting tonuclear weapons. Not at all incidentaly, the Falklandsconflict showed the central importance of leadershipand morale. I think particularly of Colonel Jonesleading his troops up against the defenders in for-tifications. He bought it, but his troops won.

The lesson of this is that we must never paintourselves into a corner in our planning and procure-ment so that some future commander is going to haveto say, "I must use inhumane methods because I havenothing else." This displays a poverty of thought andan irresponsibility that no one should have on his con-science. I believe very strongly that we here in theUnited States have the special responsibility, becauseof our history and our dedication to freedom, to be,more than any other nation, conscious of the limita-tions on the great power we exercise- We must behumane and civilized. And both our foreign policyand our military policy must have moral content.

Now I'd like to talk for a minute about the respon-sibility of leaders for the people in their outfits.Napoleon had his shortcomings, but he also had hisstrengths. He had an expression, "tough on the bigshots." In other words, "always take care of your peo-ple before you take care of yourself; always set the ex-ample." In the Naval Air Service the squadron com-mander is always first off the catapult and first intothe target. That's a good tradition, and there areanalogous traditions in all the services. This doesn'tmean that the company commander must get himselfshot. It does mean that he -will take any reasonablerisk to meet the objective that he asks any private totake. The responsibility that senior officers have to

Nuclear Deterrence 163

hold their officers to this ethic is very important. Theresponsibility the junior officers have to hold on tothis ethic is essential to their being good officers.

With regard to our responsibility for training andfor readiness, there's a saying that sweat in peacesaves blood in war. But it's not that easy. There aresituations in which blood must be risked in order thatthere may be readiness. You might send your air wingout in the middle of a dark foggy night from an air-craft carrier in radio mission control. The pilots arerisking their lives and you, the skipper, are responsi-ble for their lives. But it's necessary. As I said, thereare analogous things throughout the services: long-range, low-altitude missions in B-52s, underwaterdemolition team operations, and so forth. But it willbe your responsibility as professionals to make surethat no stone is left unturned, if it is humanly possi-ble, to get the necessary training without excessivelyrisking your people.

Peacetime responsibilities are, in some curiousways, tougher than wartime responsibilities. I've serv-ed three tours in the Pentagon, and I have seen of-ficers I know risked being shot, not once but manytimes, in wartime, running around those halls scaredto death about some paper they were pushing, scaredto death to move away from a party line, scared todeath to take a position in opposition to what waspopular. I'm not saying that everybody should be amaverick. I'm saying it will be your responsibility tospeak up at the proper time and in the proper place,and not let what you think is wrong go by acclama-tion.

Turning our thinking to war, there are all sorts ofwar operations. There are well executed, smart ones,and there are poorly executed, dumb ones. In World

164 Noel Gayler

War One the cream of the young men of the countriesengaged in that great European civil war, the Ger-mans, the French, the British and the Russians, wereslaughtered by generals who could think of nothingexcept sending them over the top into the barbed wireand the machine guns. They lost the absolute best of ageneration. You can't be more incompetent than that.On this matter we should listen to Sun Tzu: "Figureout how to do things so that you get the maximum ef-fect and least bloodshed."

I think of the operation that we calledLinebacker II, very near the end of the Vietnam War,where the Air Force and the Navy went up to Hanoiand between us we cut off Hanoi from the outside.We never bombed the city itself except by accident.We did not bomb it on Christmas though it's beenknown as the Christmas bombing. But in eight and ahalf days of atrocious weather, Air Force and Navypilots flying up against guided missiles shut the placedown. And the most effective single part of thatoperation, perhaps the most effective military opera-tion of the war, was the mining of Haiphong, whichcut off supply utterly from the sea and had a curiouscharacteristic -nobody got killed on either side. Youcan contrast that with Hamburger Hill and a lot ofother places and you can see the difference. It was ex-traordinarily effective and produced no casualties.This is a tribute to military professionalism.

By contrast, for many years in Vietnam we hadapplied the efforts of two presidents, three secretariesof state and countless others in the notion of raisingthe ante, simply raising the threshold of pain, untilthe North Vietnamese would deal with us. Of courseit didn't work, because it was so gradual, so tele-graphed, so necessary for the Chinese and the

Ndw~ Detw'wwe 10

Russian=, who were then allies, to raise the ante cor-respondingly or lose face before the communistworld. ADlit did was keep escalating; all it did was killa hell of a lot of people on both sides including a lotof noncombatants. It seems to me attrition tactics ofthat kind, generally, are profoundly unethical. If youcan't figure out something better to do with a militaryforce than to kill a lot of people and lose a lot of peo-pie in the hope that the other guy will get tired of thebloodletting before you do, you are not only notmuch of a leader, but you're not an ethical one,either.

Now let me talk about the most extraordinarymilitary and ethical problem that the human race hasever faced -the existence and political use of manythousands of nuclear weapons. I don't know howfamiliar all of you are with nuclear weapons and theircharacteristics. I saw Hiroshima six days after it washit. I participated in the second series of atmosphericbomb tests in the Pacific. I will say that it's a greatpity that all of our leaders haven't seen these things gooff. One hundred and ten kilotons seen from twenty-one miles away looks like the end of the earth. Andmakes an impression on you that you'll never forgetand which nothing has prepared you for, nothing thatyou can read, nothing you can see in pictures. it'sawesome, but it makes these ideas of throwing tens,hundreds or even thousands of nuclear weaponsaround seem to be the imaginings of people who in avery literal sense don't know what it is they are talkingabout. I did a couple of years on the Joint StrategicTarget Planning Staff and I was one of the executingcommanders for the Los Alamos Laboratory for anumber of years. I've participated in other nuclear-related operations. The more you see of these things,

I"S Noe GO~r

the less you like them and the more you recognize thatthey have no sensible military purpose.

In point of fact, if we look at the history of thedevelopment of nuclear weapons we'll see that it's ahistory of shooting ourselves in the foot. I'm notcriticizing those who developed nuclear weapons orthose who employed them. This is Monday morningquarterbacking. But when we developed the atomicbomb, we developed the one thing that made it possi-ble to attack the United States. Before that, withgreat oceans on either side, friendly neighbors northand south, the world's largest navy, the world's mosteffective air force, and a strong ground component,nobody could have come against us. And we inventedthe one thing that made it possible for people likeQaddafi and Khomeini to hold us at risk if they evergot hold of one.

Not content with that when the Russians, in fouryears (to our great astonishment), matched ourachievement, we went to the H-bomb. We raised theante by a factor of about a thousand and defense,which had been difficult before, became impossible.Then we developed the ability to reach Russia in itsheartland and after a pause we got back the intercon-tinental ballistic missile and the warning time, whichhad been hours before, became minutes. Then wewent for the submarine-launched ballistic missile,somewhat stabilizing the situation. And then theMIRY. Many warheads on one rocket. When thatwas matched, as it inevitably was by the USSR, it putour whole land-based force at risk.

Were heavy now with cruise missiles. And we'regoing to get heavier. And the great difficulty withthem, despite their many virtues, is that they're goingto be almost impossible to verify. And so we go. If we

Nuclear Deexce 167

raise the ante once more with nuclear weapons, in myjudgment, we will find ourselves matched after a timeby the Russians, and many billions of dollars andmany billions of rubles later we will each besomewhat less secure than we are now.

What does all this tell us? It tells us, I think, thatwe should design our nuclear deterrence to bring therisk of nuclear war as close to zero as we can. I see noreason why we shouldn't sign off on "no first use."That would be more than a paper declaration,because it would eventually affect the physical equip-ment, deployment and doctrine of both sides. I see noreason why we shouldn't renounce the ideas of tac-tical nuclear war and counterforce, particularly withall the hair-trigger dangers they bring with them,because if you put your enemy's silos at risk, you givehim a premium to shoot first or, as a minimum, toshoot on warning, uncertain though that may be. Ifwe did that, if we designed our forces for minimuminvulnerable necessary deterrence, then I think theworld would be a lot safer and a lot more secure. Thedesign of deterrence is something we should givemuch thought to. We have to understand what it isand how we create the frame of mind in the leadershipin Russia that says, "No way, under no circum-stances, no how, do we initiate a nuclear war." I thinkit requires, among other things, the profound studyof the Russian military, Russian leadership and theRussian ethos. We haven't done enough of this yet.

My own hierarchy of deterrence starts with thelives of the Russian leadership (because they'rehuman they don't want to get killed any more thanany one else does), goes on to the control of the Com-munist party apparatus over the USSR, and finishesup with the military, the industry and the Russian

161 Noel Gayl.r

people. Even though I put the Russian people last inmy hierarchy, I don't mean to discount their impor-tance. I think we have to recognize that, in spite ofthe Communist party, the Russian people are theRussian people. They have enormous love andpatriotism for Mother Russia. They don't want to seetheir country destroyed. So the deterrent we makeshould be designed to hold these things at risk, whilebeing itself invulnerable.

I think it's right at this time to evaluate thepotential for defense against nuclear attack, par-ticularly the value of space defense against ballisticmissile attack. I'm very sorry the subject has gottensuch national attention, because I think it's hurryingdown the wrong road. The schemes for defense fromspace are elaborate, but most of them are technicallyimpractical to say the least. And all of them aremilitarily impractical from the standpoint of com-mand and control in any realistic way. Let me il-lustrate some of the problems. One scheme proposesthat you have lasers on the ground beaming from amirror in space to a target some thousands ofkilometers away. Well, in the first place, laser energydoesn't go through clouds. It's absorbed, defocused.If you had a clear day, you'd have to have many mir-rors in orbit in order to have one in the right place.When your energy hits the mirror, a hundred percentof it won't be reflected. Some of this enormousenergy will heat up the mirror and distort the focus.The accuracy we're talking about is a few microns;that is, about the width of my finger as seen from theairport. To engage in succession hundreds of missileswith this kind of accuracy from a number ofpresumably defocused mirrors presents a problem,and it's difficult to come up with any conceptual way

Nuckear Detenwnce 169

of solving it. Even if you do solve these problems,countermeans; are pretty easy. Your enemy can put amirror surface on his missiles. The laser energyreflects just as easily off such a surface as it does off amirror . But maybe you put the laser up in space.You're talking about using many tons of fuel for eachshot. And the satellite you'll need is a lot bigger, fat-ter, easier to hit and more expensive than the missilesit's out to destroy.

What about particle beams? Electron beams,proton beams. The problem with particle beams isthat they're made of charged particles. They reactagainst any magnetic field, and the earth puts out apretty big magnetic field. So the particle beams don'tgo in straight lines. They move, instead, in a cork-screw spiral. Try to hit something with a corkscrewspiral! Could you strip them to get neutral energybeams? Conceivably, but nobody knows how to do itat the energies required.

Finally, what about the scheme heading thesethings with nuclear-pumped hot x-ray lasers? I'mtalking about a nuclear explosive device in space thatdirects part of its energy in a particular direction inthe form of hot x-rays. Well, the system obviouslyblows itself up. And, ultimately, you're going to havehundreds, maybe thousands, of nuclear weapons or-biting in space, not all of which you could identify.

Well, I could go on and on. But the notion thatyou're going to be able to operate one of these high-technology defenses, with its physical difficulties, itsoperational difficulties, perfectly the first timearound in a massive defense plan defies the imagina-tion. Now, some people are very fond of invokingscience as a god and saying, gosh, you know, therewere scientists who said the bumblebee couldn't fly,

1701 Nod Gail',

that an atomic bomb was impossible, and whatnot,and surely, given enough time, enough money,enough support, we could solve these problems.

But it's not that kind of problem. It's a problemmore like crime in the streets or drug abuse - it's notamenable to a scientific solution. As a matter of fact,it's very much like the anti-submarine problem thatthe Navy has struggled with for at least the forty-oddyears I was in it. There's been a lot of money spentand a lot of scientific energy spent on that problem inthose forty-odd years. And we're further behind nowin defense against the modern submarine than wewere when we started forty years ago. It's that kind ofproblem.

Well, there are two well-known psychologicalcharacteristics which prevent most people from ad-dressing the problem of nuclear weapons. One is theproblem of denial: this is just too bad, too tough tothink about; I can't bear to think about it, so IIll thinkabout something else. The other one is a feeling ofhelplessness: this is something only the expertsunderstand, and they're the only ones who can doanything about it. Who am I to do anything about it?The military leaders facing the problem of nuclearweapons are not ethically entitled to these two excuseswhen considering the security of this country and thefuture of the world.

Paul R. Vie ti

MORALITY IN TARGETINGOBJECTS OF MILITARY VALUE:A RESPONSE

ADMIRAL GAYLER'S COMMENTS on thelinkage between professional competency and ethicalresponsibility are right on the mark. The imperativefor competency in military commanders is strongerthan in most other professions where, perhaps, fewerlives are at stake. Not only is the combat commandercommitted to accomplishing legitimate military ob-jectives on the battlefield (a moral obligation initself), but he is also responsible for minimizing lossof life of those under his command and for avoidingunnecessary death and destruction to civilian popula-tions on either side. In addition, the commander hasresponsibilities toward his enemy on the battlefield,both in terms of the means he employs in combat andin his treatment of those he captures. Thus, the com-mander's moral obligation to accomplish legitimatemilitary objectives -the mission -is constrained bythese often competing moral responsibilities.

Colonel Viotti, USAF, is Professor and Deputy Head ofthe Department of Political Science at the US Air ForceAcademy. This article is reprinted from the US Air ForceAcademy Journal of Professional Military Ethics, August1983.

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172 PuaR. filtt

Weighing alternative courses of action in view ofthese multiple responsibilities and making very hardchoices are the commander's central tasks. Com-petency and moral responsibility thus merge as thedefining characteristic of the professional soldier,particularly in his role as combat commander.

I have no quarrel with Admiral Gayler's skep-ticism concerning the feasibility of fighting andprevailing in (or winning) limited nuclear wars. Theprospect of nuclear war, whether or not it could orwould be "limited," seems too horrible to consider asa viable policy option. The part of his argument thattroubles me, however, is his advocacy of a finite, in-vulnerable deterrent. He abhors the "terrible prece-dent of the destruction of whole cites in World WarII," but then proceeds to support a force posture andtargeting doctrine that would put civilian populationsat greatest risk.

In their defense, advocates of counter-citytargeting as the first line of deterrence argue thatmaking the prospect of nuclear war so horribleminimizes its likelihood. On the other hand, one canquestion on practical grounds the feasibility of an in-vulnerable, finite deterrent, the credibility of counter-city threats and the consequent stability of the deter-rent relation based on them. Leaving these issuesaside, targeting civilian populations per se wouldseem difficult to justify militarily or morally.

If the military purpose in warfare is to defeat anenemy, this is done (following classic militaryprescriptions articulated by Clausewitz and others) bydestroying or substantially weakening an enemy'swar-making capability. In this regard, counter-citybombing during World War II failed to weakenenemy morale, which had been considered central toits warighting -capability. Rather than weaken the

Moralty In Tawedin 173

will to resist, such bombing may have bolsteredenemy resolve and thus may have been counter-productive militarily. As a first condition one mustexpect that the means used (or threatened and thuspotentially used) in warfare would accomplish somevalid military purpose if they are to have any chanceof being moral. (Other conditions would includeassuring proportionality between means used andends sought and employing weapons that can be useddiscriminately and without causing needless suffer-ing.) In any event, if military utility is a minimal re-quirement, then targeting doctrines with no (or evennegative) military value cannot be justified morally.

While it is certainly true that civilian populationswould suffer greatly in a nuclear war, regardless oftargeting doctrine employed, advocating civilianpopulation centers as the primary target is a prescrip-tion for nuclear Armageddon should deterrencebreak down for any reason. Objects for destruction(or threatened destruction) in warfare, regardless ofweapon employed, should be the same; in nuclear asin conventional war, military activity should bedirected toward eliminating or substantially weaken-ing an enemy's war-making capability. Accordingly,nuclear targets should be those of military value to anadversary.

Given the proximity of such targets of militaryvalue to population centers, massive death anddestruction would occur in any event. It is at leastarguable, however, that the degree of suffering wouldbe less if targets of military value were struck than ifthe targets were population centers per se. Of course,those who favor counter-city targeting as the first lineof deterrence are quick to point out the dangersassociated with targeting objects of military value toone's enemy. Indeed, one's intentions could be

174 Paul R. Viottl

perceived by an adversary as building a credible war-fighting posture, fueling an arms race, making thedeterrence relation less stable and thus increasing thelikelihood of war. On the other hand, when one con-siders the collateral death and destruction that bothsuperpowers would experience in even a limitednuclear exchange, it is difficult to imagine how eitherwould seriously entertain the notion that starting sucha war would accomplish any useful purpose. In short,nuclear deterrence based on targeting objects ofmilitary value to an adversary would seem to bemilitarily viable and morally preferable to deterrencebased on counter-city targeting.

Admiral Gayler also advocates a "no first use"pledge with respect to nuclear weapons. Given Sovietand Warsaw Pact superiority in numbers of manycategories of non-nuclear weaponry, the UnitedStates and its NATO allies have relied on the threat ofresort to nuclear weapons as a deterrent to the out-break of war in Europe. Although the United Stateshas persistently pressured its Allies to make muchgreater defense expenditures, there is little indicationthat the NATO allies have the political will (or,perhaps, capability) to bear the enormous economiccosts associated with building a viable conventionaldeterrent, even if one were attainable. Building betterconventional force capabilities and thus raising thenuclear threshold are certainly worthwhile goals, butwe should not delude ourselves into thinking thatsuch a force can be a substitute for ultimate relianceon nuclear weapons.

Forward defense coupled with the threat ofresort to nuclear weapons should conventionaldefenses fail is central to deterrence in Europe. It isnot surprising that the loudest protests against a "no

Morality In Targeting 175

first use" pledge have come from the Germans who

see the threat of early resort to nuclear weapons asessential to maintaining peace in Europe. For theirpart, Germans and other Europeans do not respondwell to sometimes facile statements by their Americanfriends about either limited nuclear or conventionalwarfighting options. Germans often say that they do

not know who will win the next war inEurope-whether it is conventional or nuclear, but in

either case they know who will be the loser. They will.

Kenneth H. Wenker

MILITARY NECESSITYAND MORALITY

FIRST, IT IS CLEAR that not all institutionalpractices are specified in regulations and policies. Infact, the nonregulatory practices are often open tomore abuse. They are not subject to periodic review.They are more ingrained and hence less easilychanged. They often affect the whole environment inwhich the job is done, rather than just a specific task.For example, in my own office the junior officers aregiven a great deal of autonomy and not very muchclose, constant supervision. It could be different, ofcourse; but the current institutional practice is deeplyingrained.

While most institutional practices we commonlyreflect on are what we might call practices of ac-tion-the way we do things-others are conceptualpractices-the way we think about things. So, for ex-ample, we talk about Air Force doctrine: an institu-

Colonel Kenneth H. Wenker, former Professor andDeputy Head of the Department of Philosophy and FineArts at the US Air Force Academy, is currently assigned atMaxwell Air Force Base. This essay was originallypresented at the Fifth Joint Services Conference on Profes-sional Ethics, at National Defense University, January1983, and published in the US Air Force Academy Journalof Professional Military Ethics, August 1983.

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178 Kenneth H. Wenker

tionalized way of thinking. Or, for another example,we officially encourage not merely external com-pliance with nondiscrimination policies, but internalacceptance of the basic concepts behind such policies.The way we think about minorites and females is aconceptual institutional practice.

The institutional practice I am addressing in thispaper is a nonregulatory, conceptual practice-anunofficial way of thinking.

The practice about which I am concerned is thepractice of looking on "military necessity" as a prac-tical, unavoidable, nonmoral need which is opposedto moral concerns which restrain us in the pursuit ofour mission.

Thus we quite commonly hear persons takingthis line of thought: "I'm sick and tired of thebleeding heart moralists telling us how to fight a war!War is hell! The bottom line is that, moral or im-moral, nice or rotten, you've got to win. Don't letmorality stand in the way of victory. Nice guys finishlast, after all. And while we might be able to acceptthat in sports or in business, we cannot accept it inwar. The cost is too high. The moral must yield tonecessity."

Or, from the other end of the spectrum, onemight hear: "I'm sick and tired of the generals want-ing to orphan little kids and blow half the enemypopulation to smithereens, all in the name of victory.We must begin to understand that our country has noalternative but to commit ourselves to the moral. Themoral is of supreme importance, and it must win outover the merely practical. Being right is more impor-tant than the glory of victory."

The problem with both extremes is that both por-tray the problem as a tension between the moral and

Miliary Necessary and Moralty 179

the (nonmoral) practical. The truth is that, as withmost significant problems, the tension is really be-tween two conflicting moral needs. It is not a questionof deciding whether the moral or the nonmoral willwin out in the end. It is a question of decidingwhether one real, legitimate moral concern or a con-flicting real, legitimate moral concern should win outin a particular situation at a particular time.

The heart of the issue is that we have an institu-tional practice - an erroneous institutional practice -

of looking at "military necessity" as nonmoral, butpractical, demand. This is a terrible mistake. Let meexplain.

I am assuming that, should our country go towar, there is a moral goal, a moral intention, a moralend in mind. Furthermore, the moral end at stake isof very high importance. It is so important to us -somorally important to us - that we are willing to putour own lives and the lives of those we love on the linein order to attain that moral end. The moral end is soimportant that we believe it is worth tremendous ex-pense, tremendous destruction, and tremendous in-terruption of our normal lifestyles.

If the war is to attain such an important moralend, then it becomes morally important as a means tothat end that we in fact win the war - not necessarilyin the sense of militarily crushing the enemy, butrather in the sense of achieving the moral end forwhich the war is fought.

"Military necessity," simply put, is that which isnecessary or useful for attaining the moral end forwhich the war is fought. And because it is the meansto a moral end, it becomes morally important.

This does not mean that it automatically over-rides other, conflicting moral concerns. After all, thefact that an end is morally important does not justify

180 Kenneth H. Wenker

any means that might be useful or necessary to attainit. Tough moral decisions are still necessary. In fact,our own regulations give only the general principles,putting the responsibility for moral decision makingin specific situations squarely on the commander'sshoulders.

To summarize my point: our institutional prac-tice of looking at "military necessity" as a nonmoralelement is wrong. Military necessity is in fact alegitimate moral concern.

Having pointed out the institutional practice oferroneously viewing military necessity as a nonmoralrather than a moral concern, the next task is to showthat this institutional practice leads to ethical prob-lems which are more than theoretical.

As I see it, this institutional practice has two veryreal and very dangerous implications. The first is thatit leads to an attitude that ethics is not all that impor-tant. The second is that it is one part of a moregeneral failing. That failing is our all-too-frequentlack of awareness of real ethical problems. Let me ex-plain each of these.

If we are prepared to put morality aside in favorof the "practical" in one situation, then we will beprepared to set it aside for the practical in other situa-tions. While in the case of military necessity the"practical" is indeed a real moral concern, in othercases the "practical" might be merely such things aspromotions, status, or other egoistic concerns. I dobelieve that the practice of looking at military necess-ity as being opposed to and more important thanmorality supports whatever tendency one might haveto put moral concerns second to other concerns.

Military Necesay and Morality 181

The other problem the erroneous understandingof military necessity contributes to is a failure to real-ly be aware of, and sensitive to, moral concerns.

The vast majority of persons I've been associatedwith in our armed services are genuinely good people,concerned about doing what they judge to be right,and committed to doing as well as they can evenunder adversity. Further, to a somewhat lesser extent,but still far beyond what you could ask of any groupof human beings, they bring some pretty good at-titudes, values, experiences, and reflection to theirmoral judgments. When they see that they are in asituation which calls for a moral judgment, they areusually quite capable of doing well in making thosejudgments. To put it more to the point, most of myassociates in the armed services do make good moraljudgments and follow them, provided they do realizethat they are in a situation which calls for a moraljudgment.

It's that last clause that causes a problem: "pro-vided they do realize that they are in a situation whichcalls for a moral judgment." It seems to me that theethical failings in the armed services are not foundprimarily in people who do what they judge to bewrong. Nor is it found primarily in people who makepoor judgments about right and wrong. Rather, it isfound in the fact that too many of us often fail to seethat the problems we deal with on a daily basis are infact ethical problems. We don't make bad ethicaljudgments, but all too often we make no ethical judg-ment and all -at least not consciously. And, in prac-tice, this means that we adopt solutions to our ethicalproblems without the ethical reflection they demand.

Let me illustrate my point with a personal con-fession of my own shortcomings in this regard.

152 Kenneth H. Wenker

Several years ago - longer than I care to admit - as avery junior captain I found myself the Chief ofMaintenance of a large maintenance function of some500 electronics technicians spread over all of north-east Turkey. I was really too young and inexperiencedto do the job as well as it deserved. One of my short-comings was that I was overly impressed with thecomputer products generated by the MaintenanceData Collection System. I naively believed there was adirect, one-to-one relationship between the variousstatistics and the quality of the skills, efforts, andleadership of myself and the noncommissioned of-ficers. If we met all the numerical standards, we weredoing well. If we fell short in any area, we were doingpoorly and had significant problems which had to becorrected.

After a few short months I started to notice thestatistics for our high frequency transmitter shopbeginning to deteriorate. So I called in the NCOIC;and even though he was doing an excellent job underunusually difficult circumstances, I let him know thathe had to do better so that the maintenance datawould reflect his good work. I put a lot of pressure onhim. After a few days I noticed a near-miraculous im-provement in the maintenance data. Every preventivemaintenance routine was done on time. And if thetech order indicated a procedure should take twentyminutes, then it took somewhere between eighteenand twenty-two minutes. The failure rate dropped tonear zero, and the time to repair was invariably whatthe tech order suggested as appropriate. In short, theNCOIC was lying by manipulating the data on the in-put cards.

He meant well, I'm sure; he just wanted to getthis dumb captain off his back over trivia, so that he

Miliary Necessary and Morality 183

could continue to do the "real" work as well as hecould. The problem was with the dumb captain. Hewas so naive that he didn't even realize what wasgoing on. He thought the NCOIC had simply tight-ened up the shop a bit, so that the maintenance reallydid improve. The problem was not that the captaindid what he thought wrong. The problem was that thecaptain didn't even see the moral implications of whathe was doing. He didn't have the slightest suspicionthat his "purely practical" decision was in reality anethical decision.

I believe that the biggest ethical problem we faceis that many persons are not alert to the moral im-plications of their decisions. Most significant deci-sions that an officer makes are ethical decisions: theyaffect human beings and their lives and lifestyles; theyseek the most effective ways to defend crucial, fun-damental national values; they involve resolving ten-sions between conflicting values. Nonetheless, all toooften we look upon our decisions as either outside thescope of moral thinking or as so "practical" or"necessary"~ as to overrule moral concerns.

For example, a commander might think, "I haveno choice. I simply must demand that we get thisreport out even if my troops have to work late onChristmas Eve to do it. Yes, I know there is a moralconcern to nourish family life and keep familiestogether, especially at this time of year. But in thiscase we can't afford the luxury of the moral. We mustyield to the practical instead."

In this example, the commander naively believesthat the decision to be made is a practical one and nota moral one. But he's just fooling himself. He's reallymaking a moral decision, a decision that is not be-tween the moral and the practical, but rather between

184 Kenneth H. Wenker

two conflicting moral concerns. The one, of course, isthe need to support close family relationships. Theother is the moral value attached to the successful ac-complishment of the mission and to his own sense ofdoing well; presumably getting the report finished willlead to the attainment of certain important valueswith some degree of immediacy and certainty. Whatthe commander is really doing is weighing the moralneed to support close family relationships against themoral importance of the mission and the relation ofthis particular report to the success of the mission.The root problem illustrated by the example is notthat the commander made a poor moral decision butrather that he didn't even realize there was a moraldecision to be made.

The subject of this conference has to do with "in-stitutional practices which lead to ethical abuse." Onekind of such institutional practice lies in our tendencyto present certain kinds of problems as being conflictsbetween the practical and the moral. In reality, theyare conflicts between differing moral concerns. Bymisrepresenting this conflict, we erroneously teachpeople that, in the end, morality is not all that impor-tant, since it so often must yield to the practical.Ultimately this leads to our not really being com-mitted to morality; we become committed instead tosatisfying whatever pressures happen to seemunavoidable. Morality becomes of secondary impor-tance. It becomes "nice-to-have" or optional ordispensable. And as long as this attitude dominates,we will never bring about that kind of character sonecessary to our armed forces: a character thatrefuses to put morality second to anything.

Joseph V. Potter

WAR GAMES

ONE QUALITY that is absolutely essentialin a professional Air Force pilot is disciplined airman-ship. Not only does this trait help insure safety offlight and enhance a pilot's chances for survival incombat, it contributes immeasurably to the successfuloutcome of any mission. For example, that missionmay call for an "o-dark-thirty" takeoff in marginalweather. To accomplish this maneuver wingmen of aflight of aircraft must hang on to the lead aircraftwith only a wingtip light in sight, vertigo pulling onevery sense. In this situation a pilot often experiencesmuscle cramps from straining to hold the tight forma-tion. In addition, he may have to penetrate throughheavy enemy groundfire dodging missiles and heavyautomatic weapons fire. Also, while facing possibleengagement with enemy aircraft, he must preciselyemploy his weapons against heavily defended targets.Finally, there is the long, bone-weary flight back to

Colonel Potter, 15th Air Base Wing Vice Commander,Hickham Air Force Base, served at the Air Force Academyas Chief of the Airmanship Division and Director of Plans,Policy, and Scheduling for the Commandant of Cadets.His essay is from the US Air Force Academy Journal ofProfessional Military Ethics, December 1982.

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186 Joseph V. Petter

base that requires critical air-to-air refueling and aprecision landing with a possibly damaged aircraft orpartially incapacitating wounds.

From a perspective where airmanship skills areviewed as determining life or death, all the "rules andregulations" of flying make crystal clear sense. Rulesthat state that an aircrew must have adequate crewrest, avoid self-medication, conduct thorough pre-flight inspections, prepare detailed crew briefings,and execute meticulous flight planning are all vitalelements in what I call disciplined airmanship. In ourday-to-day training environment, however, we oftentend to lose sight of the purpose behind regulationsand may find convenient ways to short-cut the systemquite successfully or bend the rules so as to "break themonotony" of what on the surface appear as nuisancerequirements or unnecessary details. This attitude ofavoiding rules or disregarding them is dangerous,since it will lull an inexperienced, naive pilot into afalse sense of security and complacency.

While the temptation is great for many pilots torebel against flying discipline by doing such things asbreak formation, buzz houses, skim mountain peaksand lakes, chase cattle, fly underneath anything thathas daylight under it, and a million other "hot dog"tactics, the wise, professional pilot should quicklydevelop a realization that his actions affect thegeneral state of airmanship discipline in his squadronas well as reflect his personal commitment to profes-sionalism. At the Air Force Academy, each officer'sattitude and actions are clearly signalled to cadets,and a lax, carefree manner could be easily emulatedby impressionable young students. More importantly,a lax, complacent attitude, if absorbed by cadets,could lead to catastrophic consequences for them

War Games 157

when they later become pilots. Professional, ethicalconduct then is especially imperative for officers andleaders at the Academy, both on and off duty. Thefollowing three examples may help illustrate mypoint.

While I was still a young pilot with anundeveloped sense of discipline, and because of peerpressure, complacency, inexperience, and naivete, Icourted danger needlessly and stacked the oddsprecariously against myself. For example, as one ofsix Forward Air Controllers (FACs) stationed atPhouc Vinh, Vietnam, in 1967 with the 1st Brigade,1st Infantry Division, we pilots shared the danger,fear, frustration, loneliness and hardships of combattogether. By flying two or three times a day, sevendays a week, we rapidly built an intimate knowledgeof the terrain, enemy movements and potentialtargets. When not involved in actual battle, providingair cover for friendly troop operations, or directingairstrikes against preplanned targets, we were free toactively seek out the enemy, develop intelligence in-dicators, or engage in "war games," a few of which Idescribe below.

Rang-Rang. Buried deep in the triple canopied jungleof War Zone D stood an old abandoned airstrip:Rang-Rang. Legend had it that the airstrip had beenabandoned by the French after the Viet Minhdecimated a defending Vietnamese Ranger battalionand stacked their bodies, like firewood, on the run-way. The object of our contest was to see who wouldbe the first FAC to accomplish a "touch and go" land-ing at Rang-Rang. The runway was deeply rutted,which could easily flip an 0-l1 Bird Dog FAC air-

188 Joseph V. Potter

craft, and ground fire from the surrounding junglewas always heavy whenever we made low passes.Although I made many passes one or two feet abovethe ground, I never touched down (nor did any otherFAC), but I did pick tip a lot of bullet holes in theprocess.

Porkchop. Located deep in the jungle of War Zone Dwas a small clearing in the shape of a porkchop. Justinto the treeline stood a rather large thatch-roofedstructure that held enemy supplies. The structure waspart of an occupied base camp and the camp washeavily defended. The object of our "Porkchop"game was to see who would be the first FAC to burndown the "hootch." The rules prohibited firing whitephosphorous (WP) rockets from a safe distance andaltitude. The only "approved method" of destroyingthe hootch was to pull the pin on a WP hand grenade,hold it out the pilot's window, dive at a steep angle,and try to lob it across the clearing into the frontopening of the hootch while flying as low and as fastas possible, and then to escape from the inevitablehail of ground fire by skimming the treetops. Thegrenade would usually explode harmlessly or burn on-ly a short time against the monsoon rain-soaked sidesof the structure. My near downfall came one daywhen, determined to win, I decided to make a secondpass. This time enemy gunners had me bracketed withcrossfire between two 50-caliber machine gunemplacements as I started my dive holding a grenadeout the window. Fiery red baseballs grazed my planeas I continued the dive and somehow escaped justabove the trees.

War Games 189

Trust Your Crew Chief. The rules of this game calledfor the pilot to disregard his preflight inspection corn-pletely, thus demonstrating "trust" in a crew chief andmonumental stupidity at the same time. One fine day,after demonstrating my trust, I spotted a squad ofenemy soldiers at the end of a long reconnaissanceflight. I pinned them down on the trail with severalrockets while simultaneously calling up an artilleryfire mission. While flying a semi-circular horseshoepattern, I began adjusting the artillery impacts untilthey were "zeroed in." Just as I gave the command"Fire for effect!," my engine sputtered and coughedto a stop. With inaccurate float type fuel gauges, weflew by time of flight (usually four hours) and I hadjust calculated another 30 minutes of fuel remaining.I frantically switched fuel tanks (although the firsttank was already empty) and activated a fuel boostpump, but it was too late. The crew chief had in-advertently failed to top off the fuel tanks after per-forming a preflight engine run-up test and Idemonstrated "trust" by not checking to see that theywere full prior to takeoff. I called "Mayday,Mayday!" as the plane glided toward the jungle. If Isurvived the crash through 300-foot trees, thewelcoming committee would consist of the sametroops that I had just placed artillery fire on. Therewere no options left; I sat stunned and motionlesswatching the jungle rise up closer and knowing thatthis was where I would die. Only a few seconds fromthe top of the trees, the engine miraculously caught,coughed and began running! I pulled sharply up andtoward my base and, as the artillery fire continued,limped and sputtered somehow back to base. As Itouched down on the runway, the prop finallystopped completely and I rolled to a silent stop.

190? Joseph V. Potter

I could relate many more episodes similar to theones above but their point is the same: the values ofindividual professionalism, responsibility, integrity,and leadership are learned attributes of characterdeveloped through personal experiences, repeated ex-posure to positive role models, and habitual practice.Ample opportunities are provided to members of theAcademy community to help develop these attributesin cadets through personal involvement with themand by setting an example. These characteristics areextremely valuable as they will be instrumental inhelping young officers avoid situations (such as my"4war games') that needlessly jeopardize lives andequipment.

One does not have to point to the extremes ofwar to ind such situations. Impressionable youngcadets, emulating their favorite squadron participant,sponsor, AOC, or activity advisor demonstratingmacho drinking bouts or reckless behavior canperceive a wrong communication of professionalbehavior. Obedience and adherence to the "regs,"proper decorum, and loyalty up and down the chainof command are not principles that require rigid,lock-step regimentation. Instead, the principles theseterms represent reaffirm the practical utility whichpersonal integrity, professional responsibility, andleadership provide for military organizations.Disciplined airmanship results from psychologicaland ethical patterns of thought and behaviordeveloped through day-to-day practice. High stan-dards in any organization reflect and support highstandards among all its members. Increasingawareness and attention to military bearing andcourtesy, participation in unit, base, youth and cadetactivities, active professional reading, using seatbelts,

War Games 191

moderate drinking (no one said it would be easy), plusmany other patterns of behavior contribute to thedevelopment of a military professional. Thesebehavior patterns also serve as positive signalstransmitted daily to cadets, NCOs and subordinateofficers.

Whether assigned to the USAF Academy, amissile base, a tanker squadron or a researchlaboratory, you will be expected to live by a highethical code. Anything less undermines the standardsof a professional organization. Deviation from thosestandards will have a significant impact on young,developing cadets, lieutenants, NCOs or civilian co-workers watching from the sidelines. Perhaps yourexample will be the key ingredient that will preventthat individual from engaging in "war games" in thefuture.

William E. McCarron

ON MACHIAVELLIAND VIETNAM

NEAR THE CENTER of Europe's foremostRenaissance city, Florence, stands a magnificentFranciscan church, the Basilica of Santa Croce.Beneath its pointed Gothic arches it houses onemonument and three tombs: a monument to Danteand the tombs of Michelangelo, Galileo, andMachiavelli. Whether by design or accident, it is amomentous place, for if one were to single out fourmen who laid the cornerstone for Renaissance man'srebirth in literature, art, science, and politics, itwould be these four men.

Perhaps the least understood of these "fourhorsemen" of the Renaissance is Niccolo Machiavelli.The most influential of his works is a short, singulartreatise called The Prince. Rather than arguing, as allof his predecessors had, that the science of ruling andwarring is an idealistic philosophical one of moralprecepts, of what -should be" and "ought to be,"Machiavelli detailed the reality of what he saw around

Lieutenant Colonel McCarron, USAF, now retired, wasAssociate Professor of English at the US Air ForceAcademy. His essay is reprinted from the US Air ForceAcademy Journal of Professional Military Ethics, August1982.

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194 Wffm E. McCaron

him in the Italian city states of Renaissance Italy, anarticulation of "what was" and "what was likely to goon." Thus, if Machiavelli saw (as he did see) a PrinceSforza of Milan taking harsh and sometimes ultimatemeasures against his newly-captured enemies,Machiavelli told what Sforza did.

An unfortunate aspect of Machiavelli's rathersimple documentary and commentary was that it wasmisinterpreted. When Machiavelli wrote how Sforza,or Cesare Borgia, or Pope Julius treated theirenemies, their behavior was taken as a model of what"should be" done by his precocious but admiringreaders. Though not all of Europe's monarchs andprinces forgot their heritage of Christian morality andtook Machiavelli exactly at his word, many of theRenaissance playwrights did.

On the Renaissance stage, therefore, villains whoperpetrated bloody crimes with no apparent motiveswere given the name "Machiavel." On the stage vir-tuous women were symbolically plundered, maidenshad their tongues plucked out, and innocent men hadtheir brains dashed against the sides of cages, all inthe name of "Machiavel." English Elizabethan theateraudiences viewed a procession of villainousMachiavels who seemed preoccupied with consum-mate atrocity, including characters like Marlowe'srapacious Jew of Malta and Shakespeare's lago whobesmirches an innocent Desdemona and drives hisfaithful military superior, Othello, into epileptic fitsand eventual suicide.

One can easily point to the atrocities that oc-curred in Vietnam, atrocities practiced by both sides,and use the label "Machiavel" to characterize thewar's various villains - some Vietcong, some NVA,some South Vietnamese, and some American. And,without the redeeming value of splendid art, culture,

Oni Machiavelli and Vietnm 195

and literature which graced the Renaissance, Vietnamresembled Renaissance Italy in many ways with itsFrench and Spanish mercenaries. Not only was Viet-nam long and angular and dotted with hills andchanging geography, but the mercenaries were therealso, such as Pathet Lao infiltrators, Australian fly-ing troops, and South Korean "ROKs." Yes, therewere villains and "Machiavels" in Vietnam, atrocitiesand horrors to shake even the most steadfast and op-timistic Candide. But to say, even imply, that thelong, steadfast, protracted stageplay of Vietnam wasnothing but gruesome "Machiavellian" horror wouldbe an exaggeration, and it would also misrepresentthe essential theme of Machiavelli's The Prince.

Machiavelli's short treatise on political scienceand warfare is no mere catalogue of villainous acts. Itis a textbook commentary, long on examples, andshort on conclusions. Machiavelli points out the traitsand habits of mind of those princes, Greek andRoman, as well as Renaissance Italian, who won andlost wars. In The Prince Machiavelli concludes, timeafter time, that it takes energy and power to win abattle, hold a territory, or claim lasting victory in awar. At the very end of his treatise, Machiavellidiscards that worn out strumpet, Dame Fortune, onwhom the classical and medieval princes had blamedtheir downfall, and he says that men, modem princes,must take full responsibility for victory or failure inwarfare:

My conclusion is, then, that, as fortune is variable andmen fixed in their ways, men will prosper as long as theyare in tune with the times and will fail when they are not.However, I will say that in my opinion it is better to bebold than cautious, for fortune is a woman and whoeverwishes to win her must importune and beat her, and wemay observe that she is more frequently won by this sort

196 WI=a E. McCarron

than by those who proceed more deliberately. Like awoman, too, she is well disposed to young men, for theyare less circumspect and more violent and more bold tocommand her.

Though it would be impetuous and improbablesimply to use Machiavelli's The Prince as a guide forjudging events in Vietnam, some things he says areapplicable to war, such as his injunction for leaders tobe "in tune with the times," be "bold rather thancautious," and be "disposed toward young ratherthan old men." In Vietnam, the common footsoldier,airman, marine, and sailor, as well as their princelycommanders, were in tune with the latest rock beatbut they were not in tune with the huge, 40-year war

r that had dominated the history of modern Vietnam.And in Vietnam audacious actions were confined tooccasional night patrols and assaults; for the mostpart, we sat in an enclosed area and waited for thewar to come to us. In Vietnam, the decisions of im-mediate import were, of course, made in the heat ofbattle, but the philosophy of war, the underlyingprinciples of battle, were made in buildings half aworld away by men more interested in countingbodies than in the objectives of winning and holdingground, of engaging and beating an enemy, and ofestablishing and maintaining a just and lasting peace.

This is not to say that older men, sitting indeliberation in another hemisphere, were to blame.This is not to say, either, that Machiavelli's treatise ofwhat Renaissance military leaders actually did shouldhave been a guidebook for conducting operations inSoutheast Asia. It does mean, though, that thereshould have been a commitment to winning the war,not at all costs, surely, but there should have been agoal firmly in mind at all times. In not having such a

On Machiavel and Vketan 197

clear goal, we deceived ourselves. Ironically, we dealt,ever increasingly, -with the reality of what was, that isthe stopping of a guerrilla war through sporadic ac-tion and momentary aggression and shortsighted ob-jectives controlled by the immediate circumstances,while we gradually abandoned our mission of whatshould have been in Vietnam, a vision predicated on abold commitment to free a nation from unwarrantedexternal aggression.

If military power means having more firepowerthan the enemy, then we had it. If military powermeans controlling the airspace for 10 years over awar-torn country, then we did it. If military powermeans control of seaports, straight-in routes to bombenemy supply areas in the North, and the ability tosweep an area and control it, we had all of this if wewanted. Instead, we were cautious rather than bold,we listened to procrastination from politicians ratherthan the pleas of battlefield comman~ders, and wewere naively attentive to the ideals of peace and goodwill to all men, no matter who mouthed those idealsso as to mask their real intentions.

So, very simply, we lost the war. Not in a savageand bitter retreat from a stronger enemy; not becausewe didn't speak an Oriental tongue nor understand anOriental heart; not in disgrace; not even in dishonor.We simply decided not to win.

Old, staid soldiers encamped on foreign soil,cautious as old maids at a debutante's ball, we dancedto the enemy's tune. We were 55 days at Peking in theBoxer Rebellion drawn out to ten long years; we werethe designers of our own Maginot Line, now withsandbags and concertina wire instead of fortifiedbunkers and an enemy who employed occasional

198 MWWn E. McCarnn

blitzkriegs and then withdrew leaving us to lick ourwounds and wonder why; we were the French im-planted in a miniature string of Dien Bien Phus, butwith all the ability to break out and the dedication todo so-yet we never did. We were Da Nang andPleiku, Phan Rang and Cam Ranh Bay, Bien Hoaand Tan Son Nhut, Long Binh and Can Tho and wemade the country a miniature America, from theDMZ in the north (the California-Oregon border) toCape St. Jacques in the South (Tijuana) and lookingtoward the southern Pacific. We had our "cities" ourtowns, firebases, and outposts. We were civilization,urban power, men, might, fortitude, power, anddirectness: all self-contained and all isolated. Or sowe believed.

We had beer and soft drinks in aluminum canswhile Charles had handfuls of rice and grain. We hadhootches, entertainment, and electricity while Charleshad the tunnels and villages of the hinterlands bynight and by day. We had sleek jets, sleek riverinecraft, and armored personnel carriers while Charleshad bicycles, infiltrators, and carriers of satchelcharges. And Charlie Cong, bless his enduring soul,outwaited his powerful Uncle Samuel and claimed theCalifornia-sized country for his own. Charlie stuck tohis native soil and his Uncle returned to his.

It is not that Charles and the North Vietnamesehad a will and a way and we did not. We had a willand a way, too. The difference between us was aresult of strategy, theirs a bold and steady guerillaism,a war of destruction, as opposed to our cautious andrestrained democratic warfare, a war of preservation.You cannot build and bolster and preserve when theenemy is laying satchel charges around your founda-tion. Fear and the cut throat of a village elder at night

Potv

EDIUCATING THECITIZEN-SOLDIER

Irmo",

On Machiavell and Vketam 199

are more compelling to a village of Vietnamese thanpackets of medicine and reassurances which werehanded out from a daylight patrol. Fear, and the in-stinct for survival are more basic instincts than thosewhich the promises of safety and new crops and aneventual national democratic government cangenerate.

On the whole, we conducted a gentleman's war inVietnam. We were the Hessian troops in Trentonwhile Charles and his cohorts crossed the Delawareon Christmas Eve and raised general havoc everynight. We were always open and available. Charleswas always secretive and, like Major Major inCatch-22, always "in" when we were "out" andalways "out" when we were "i.

We were kind and thoughtful warriors. When itwas a question of a free-fire zone, we called the pro-vince chief and checked and found out, an hour later,that we could indeed drop ordnance-a half hourafter Charlie had vacated the area. When we flewnorth over the DMZ, we watched the SAM sitesunder construction, but only bombed those that wereoperational. When it was time to sit down and discusscessation of hostilities in Paris, we modern knights ofCamelot engaged in an argument about the shape ofthe table and the composition of the negotiatingteams who would be allowed to sit as representativesof the parties involved in the conflict rather thanbringing the force of arms to bear.

We were cautionary men who were in Vietnamsixteen times in sixteen years. Coming, staying for ayear, rotating home, and maybe coming back a yearor two later. Aging and growing old in spirit as eachyear wound into the next. Training, urging, leading,advising, trying to build a South Vietnamese nation

2W0 Willam E. McCa'on

while the enemy was raiding, coercing, terrorizing,ordering at gunpoint, and destroying whatever servedhis purpose, no matter what the cost. We had thebest-trained, best-equipped armed force in the worldand, in my deepest heart, I believe we still do. But inVietnam, we followed a conservative strategy thatonly aimed to maintain a holding pattern. We lookedfor only those things which it is polite for visitors tosee. We played the role of turista: observe the localcustoms, be nice to the permanent residents, andrespect the rights of others.

Yes, I hope we will respect the rights of others,and I hope we continue to be nice to permanentresidents and to observe their customs. After all,these are the ideas we cherish for ourselves and wedon't have to turn into rapacious "Machiavels" tomake the end of our policy justify our means. But wemust also be young men who are bold when in warrather than old men hoping we don't lose, and wemust be willing to do our job as residents rather thanas tourists. To preserve the heritage of Santa Croce,to allow Dante to be read, Michelangelo to be ad-mired, and Galileo to be studied, we must not sur-render ourselves to fate and fortune, but, as youngprinces, we must pursue the spirit but not the letter ofNiccolo Machiavelli. If we fail to commit ourselves towinning future wars, then we will have only ourselvesto blame or, like Machiavelli's predecessors, we cansimply and blindly blame that fickle woman, DameFortune.

Alfred Kern

LITERARY PERCEPTION OFTHE AMERICAN MILITARY

LIKE PAINTERS under the Medicis, I amone of a legion of American writers whose lives havebeen lived within the protective walls of the univer-sity. If we venture out from time to time-perhaps abit more often than our scholar-colleagues -we alsocome scurrying back. Within the gates, we enjoy boththe status and advantage of difference. Hence, I havenever really produced scholarship - not the kindwhich is characterized by constructively diminishedintentions. For this occasion, I have been compelledto consider some writers and books under an acutelycircumscribed rubric - literary perceptions of themilitary. Of course, I had more than a notion of whatI would find; still a reconsideration of these bookshas produced findings which are inescapably bleakfor the military.

In twentieth century American literature, theprofessional military (both the institution and the

This paper was read in April 1980 before a NationalDefense Colloquium sponsored by the US Air ForceAcademy History Department. Reprinted from the US AirForce Academy Journal of Professional Military Ethics,November 1980.

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individuals who belong to it) is criticized, suspected,feared, and not infrequently identified as the enemy.A quick survey of books from World War I to thepresent-sixty years-supports this assertion almostwithout exception. For WWI, John Dos Passos' OneMan's Initiation: 1917, Three Soldiers, and the warchapters in USA, emphasize the misbehavior of theAmerican military almost to the exclusion of the Ger-man army. Dos Passos' three soldiers-an Indianafarm boy, a West Coast fisherman, and an aspiringcomposer-are destroyed by their own militaryestablishment, the writer's protest being aimed at thepeople who wear American uniforms with the Kaiser'sforces only catalytic if not incidental. E. E. Cum-mings' The Enormous Room is an early outcryagainst the blindness and self-aggrandizements ofmilitary bureaucracy. In A Farewell to Arms, Hem-ingway's description of the retreat from Caporettostill stands as some of our finest writing about war. Inthat novel, when Lt. Henry leaps into the Tagliamen-to River, he does so to save his life from paranoidcarabinieri who are shooting anybody who speaksItalian with a foreign accent. However, once safelybehind his own lines, Henry never returns; he desertsthe army and the cause.

We might have expected a different reaction byour writers to WWII. Thirty-five years later, we referto WWII as America's "last good war," a phrasewhich soldiers use in the context of historical judg-ment, "the last good war" being a distinction amongthe century's generational experiences in war andneither nostalgia nor the secret yearnings of middle-age war-lovers. And yet, the difference between theliterature of those two wars is thematically slight.Reading From Here to Eternity, the reader knows

Literarwy Perception of the American Mfltary 205

that James Jones cared for the military - forsoldiers - above his other cares; yet it is the profes-sional military at its worst that destroys PrivatePrewitt. In The Young Lions, Irwin Shaw does showus the savage genocide practiced by Nazi Germany,but we also see a nasty if less cataclysmic anti-semitism tolerated within the American army. In TheNaked and the Dead, Norman Mailer characterizesGeneral Cummings as intelligent and well-mannered,an effective if unlucky senior commander, but Cum-mings is also power-mad, a sophisticated Americanfascist with Sgt. Croft as Cummings' physical,uneducated, and brutish accessory. Of Catch-22, abook of special meaning to the Air Force, I shall sayonly that it impresses me as a novel about WWII butnot really of it; written during the fifties, the bookseems more a consequence of Heller's reaction to coldwar politics, the humorous but pervasive sense ofdoom being the reaction of a vital spirit to what theUnited States was then doing as much or more than towhat we had already done.

James Gould Cozzens may well be the one con-servative exception to our literary liberalism. AsCozzens read history and wrote his own books, he didnot believe that any of us had been promised ourheart's darling whether that heart's darling was fameor fortune or peace or Scott Fitzgerald's golden girl.Hence, the Cozzens canon places higher value on theintegrity of institutions than the fulfillment of in-dividuals. In Guard of Honor, Cozzens builds bridgesbetween the professional military and civilian Americajust as he did between the clergy and the laity in Menand Brethren and the courts and the public in TheJust and the Unjust. If his big seller, By Love Pos-sessed, was overpraised at the time of its publication,

206 Alfred Kern

his work is undervalued, perhaps because he un-derstood that despite our glory and resiliency, theAmerican system is curiously fragile and dare not betaken for granted. Yet, I must also point out here thatAmerican ebullience, humor, ingenuity, and con-structive madness are lacking in Cozzens' novels. Heapproved the decision of his ancestors-pre-revolutionary tories - to sit out the American Revolu-tion in Canada while the upstart and anti-traditionalcolonists fought for political liberty. One can only in-fer that for Cozzens even the enlightened conser-vatism of Burke was intolerably liberal.

The Korean war did not inspire a comparableliterature. Richard Kim's The Martyred is deservingand - of course - Michener produced his Koreanbook, The Bridges of Toko-Ri. Vietnam remains inthe literary throes, but if Philip Caputo's A Rumor ofWar is an indication of what is to come, the profes-sional military will be even more severely condemnedby the Vietnam generation of writers. The Caputomemoir-both confession and apology-is disturb-ingly powerful, for Caputo argues (not always uncon-vincingly) that his own acts of atrocity were in thedutiful service of an atrocious war atrociously com-manded. Ironically, our performance in Vietnamseems the worse for the very fact that Caputo doesshow us the fierce and unappealing face of the enemy.

Using these and other books, I have inferred anumber of generalizations which are typical of ourwriters' perceptions of the military. First, theAmerican military is as illiberal as American writersare liberal. At its domestic bases, the military fol-lowed local custom-hence has been less than enthu-siastic about those realizations of the constitutionalfranchise which have concerned the Congress and the

Litemry Perception of the Amercan litarM 207

Court for the past half-century. Unsympathetic toother collectives -labor unions especially-themilitary identifies with corporate leadership and cor-poration mentality despite the fact that under GeorgeMeany, the trade union movement probably was themilitary's strongest political ally since the first days ofthe cold war years. The military is sentimental aboutits heroes but distrustful of individuality. If consignedby duty to the view that the Soviet Union is America'sone and only political reality, the military seemspredisposed to live contentedly within thatmonomania. In sum, American writers have per-ceived the military establishment as having opposedsome of the very ideas and ideals for which civiliansoldiers have gone to fight.

I ask no one to accept either the correctness orjustice of such perceptions-only that I have readthese books attentively and summarized accurately.Now, what is the professional military to make of allthis? What options are available for reaction orresponse? Of course, hurt feelings are one possibility,and Kipling can be invoked in such moments: "For it'sTommy this, an' Tommy that, 'and chuck him out,the brute!' But it's Saviour of 'is country when theguns begin to shoot." And there's truth in that, truthalso in the fact that Kipling was a good poet evenbefore T. S. Eliot told college professors it would beall right for them to praise a Kipling poem. But forone reason or another, most of us have alreadydiscovered that hurt feelings prove a poor base forcreating policy or living life.

On his recent visit to the Academy, General Cur-tis LeMay demonstrated another option. At the ap-propriate moment, he merely grunted, "Left liberals,"and went on to the next point. If I knew that General

2ff Abfrd Kern

LeMay might well be referring to me, I liked himnonetheless. I liked him because he believes that warsare better deterred but once engaged in better wonthan lost. I liked him because he is more concernedwith fact than fancy. Seemingly indifferent to im-age -at least now in his sacred relic phase -like

George Patton himself the out-sized characterizationfully achieved, General LeMay could be a P.I.O.'sdream and nightmare. Finally - and mostly - I likedthe Old Man because I know that he would accept myunderstanding and respect for him as wholly ap-propriate without the slightest inclination toreciprocate.

I would tell General LeMay that I have my ownreservations about America's war literature thoughnot because the writers are left-liberals. It is not that Iresist the writer's lyric voice, the personal statementmade in the face of the cruel destinies of war. Nobodywho has waited for the return of the mission or seenan airplane fall or waited helplessly by while themedics go into the airplane with body-bags wouldsuppress the writer's outcry. For those who have seenit and who also teach cadets, I suppose the question iswhat the cadets should or might be told and what - inthe hope they will never need be told - they had betterlearn for themselves. For the worst of war, there areno courses of instruction. No, I regret that cause andhistory have been lost to personal outcry. In the caseof John Dos Passos, World War I encompassed morethan one man's initiation. Norman Mailer's concernwith the ideological arguments of Lt. Hearn andGeneral Cummings tends to overshadow the palpableenormities of the Axis powers. Ernest Hemingway'ssense of cause shines more clearly for the SpanishLoyalists than for World War II allies, and even in

Literary Pwption of the Ameiran MI~tary 209

For Whom the Bell Tolls, Pablo's slaying of thefascists is rendered with more blood-curdling realismthan any action of Franco's enemy forces. Nevermind nobility or heroism, the very fact of one man'ssuffering is diminished when its historical context islost.

But for American writers-unlike their Euro-pean counterparts-the horrors of war have over-whelmed historical context. Hemingway was rightwhen he said that nobody had touched the objectiveintensity of Tolstoi in describing the taking of aredoubt. My own literary preference is AndreMalraux. Whether fighting for the Chinese Com-munists against both Chiang Kai Shek and the Com-intern in the Shanghai uprising of 1927 or against theNazis in The Walnut Trees of Altenburg or thebrilliant passages on war in Anti-Memoirs, Malrauxintegrates historical experience and personal condi-tion-what, in my opinion, novelists are supposed todo. Art historian, writer, explorer, political activist,DeGaulle's minister of culture, soldier-the famousCol. Berger of the French Resistance, Malraux neverwrote a novel in which war was merely a personal oc-casion; in his works, the larger issues are there to givemeaning to the most horrible of personal experiences.

And so, the professional military can simplydismiss what our novelists have written about it.James Gould Cozzens did exactly that. He wasquoted as having said that Ernest Hemingway couldwrite for Little Folks magazine and that Steinbeck'sbleeding-eart liberalism made him want to throw up.But much will be lost by casting out American writersas adolescent, self-serving, and wrong-headed. Trueenough, in the present literary marketplace especially,books abound that emphasize personal adjustment

210 Agfwd Kern

over historical imperative: how to cope with middleage, how to survive divorce, how to find God and afortune in real estate on faith and borrowed money.The fact is that books to improve our characters andstatus are also part of the American literary tradition.As for the present variety of self-help books, oneneed not contend that money and orgasm are whollydespicable though neither is the pre-eminent hu-man virtue to be found in the sermons of JonathanEdwards.

The ideological struggle in American literaturehas never been between what we would think of todayas liberal versus conservative but something closer toa conflict between rational liberalism and a construc-tive radicalism. We are a revolutionary people andAmerican literature is a literature of protest - not on-ly against injustice and inequity but for quite specificqualities in the national life. As early as 1616, writinghis A Description of New England, John Smithcelebrated the positive consequences of responsible,personal freedom. He wrote, "what so truley suiteswith honour and honestie, as discovering thingsunknown? erecting townes, peopling Countries, in-forming the ignorant, reforming things unjust,teaching virtue; and gamne to our Native mother-countrie a kingdom to attend her; find imploymentfor those that are idle, because they know not what todoe; so far from wronging any as to cause Posteritieto remember thee; and remembering thee, everhonour that remembrance with praise?

At most, John Smith was a supporting player inthat adventurous age. A self-promoter, he might to-day be the author of that book on how to find Godand a fortune on faith and borrowed money. Certain-ly, his essay contains PR hype because he hoped to

LiterarY Pmeptido, of the Ameikan AMmty 211

attract other Englishmen to these shores. And it isprecisely because John Smith was who and what hewas that I've chosen to quote him. John Smith -whata marvelous name for these purposes - out of theEnglish tradition but already speaking like somebodynew, eager to do all right by himself, shamelesslyparading with a good-looking, soft-walking girl of in-digenous origin named Pocahontas, and this sameSmith not only a soldier but an officer-CaptainJohn Smith. Is it any wonder this make-out artist gotpassed over for 0-4? But no matter how wecharacterize him, real estate developer or visionary, inthe first book written in English about America, hebrought a platform that some of you may recognize:discover things unknown, build the cities, inform theignorant, find work for the unemployed, reform whatis unjust, and wrong no one.

American writers were arguing for that programa century and a half before we fought the war to callourselves Americans. And our writers have continuedto argue for it. Whitman did it in poetic plain talk.Frank Norris and Dreiser did it angrily; Scott Fitz-gerald (in The Great Gatsby) artfully and sadly. JohnSteinbeck's thirties novels, In Dubious Rattle and TheGrapes of Wrath, help us understand why somebodynamed Cesar Chavez is an American Revolutionaryleader. For those willing and unafraid to understandthe hope and anger in the black ghetto, RichardWright's Native Son remains required reading. Theirrevolutionary spirit for has been and must continue tobe the enduring theme of American literature.

In Frank O'Connor's prescription, the novel isanchored on the bedrock of historical experience.American writers must understand again that theevocations of sensibility -what in a novel I'm writing

212 A"~V Kern

is called psychiatric reality-cannot substitute forhistorical imperatives. Writers who do not fear Sovietmilitary power or suspect the dense convolutions ofthe Russian mind need only remind themselves of theplight of their Russian literary brethern-the dissi-dent writers. Solzbenitsyn was reluctant not only toleave Mother Russia but also his fellow dissidents.Once such insights are gained, we shall hardly thinkof the American military as being suspiciouslynecessary.

But if the bridges of unification are to be built,the military also has its role to play. It is not enoughto be against the monolithic, boorish, and reactionarySoviet Union. To the extent that the military im-presses the American public as self-serving, as forget-ful of our own revolutionary idealism, as enamoredof costly technologies for their own sake, as self-defensive first and nationally protective second, we

shall be wary and suspicious when we are told ofmilitary needs. Unfair as it may be to him, youngAmerica is probably more aware of Curtis LeMay asGeorge Wallace's vice-presidential candidate than ofLeMay's leadership role in SAC. American armedforces defend a revolutionary government-the best,most authentic, and humane of revolutionary govern-ments; revolution is our word, and we should sur-render it to the forces of oppression no more readilythan we should surrender peoples or land.

In conclusion, let me say that I have lived andworked easily here at the Academy, that I have feltdeep-down comfortable and at home. Furthermore, Ihave discovered that the military people who disagreewith me are apt to disagree only in degree and not inkind. But what we are. calling "perceptions" can bepowerfully destructive. Our first line of defense is

Lhpw y dwepof dush Axmduim AAW'Y 213

idea itself -what we are for- and that semns to havebeen lost or sullied in all of our institutions. If we canfind that again -in story, myth, and fact -the burdenof mutual understanding will be easy enough to bear.

Al1fred Kern

HUMANITIES AT THEHANOI HILTON

TALKING ABOUT THE HUMANITIES ismodishly in, acceptable gossip at academic cocktailparties and in board rooms, presently on a par withwhispered anecdotes about last season's moviecelebrity. "Oh, my dears, have you heard what's hap-pened to the Humanities? Well, freshen your drinkand pull up a chair and let me tell you the latest. I sawthem yesterday. Yes, all of them. I was shopping atBloomingdales - no, they weren't in the store. On thesidewalk. Staring in the window. And they lookeddreadful. Poor and shabby. And ill. They weren'teven talking to each other. The Humanities are downand out, quite down and out. Isn't it marvelouslyawful? What did I do? Just walked right past them. Imean it was terribly embarrassing. But you doremember how they used to lord it over the rest of us?Practically came right out and said we were hopelesslyuncultured and stupid. Just talked about themselvesat parties. If you ask me, the Humanities have gottenwhat they deserve."

Reprinted from Literature in the Education of the MilitaryProfessional, a publication of the US Air Force Academy,1982.

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216 Alffrd Kern

And - yes - a bit of that chortling does go happi-ly about, particularly among those who thought theyhad been snubbed as, alas, they often were. Indeed,even those who qualified for membership weresometimes scorned. It was at the University ofVirginia, location of Jefferson's American dream,that T. S. Eliot asserted with the dumb confidence ofFrench prime minister Barre that no Jew would everwrite a major American novel, an assertion that mayhave inspired Irwin Edman's couplet about Eliot's ar-riving in London "to give his thanks/at one oldchurch and two old banks." Unfortunately, thatcocktail shrew I was imitating has a point. Secure andremote in their counting houses, tracking the dropletsof contrapuntal water imagery in poems where firesflame and water freezes, served weak tea by obse-quious acolytes, the humanists were often so self-absorbed in the Humanities that mere toweringhumanness got overlooked.

And so, as you see, I've my own spleen to vent.Suffice it to say that if Watergate required us to makedistinctions between some lawyers and the law, ifmedical malpractice requires us to make similardistinctions between some doctors and medicine, andif -belatedly -we are apprehensive about some scien-tists whose curiosities go unattended by moral im-agination, so, too, must we be willing to distinguishthe Humanities from some of the licensed humanists.I speak for the Humanities, not the practitioners evenif I am one of them.

The fact is that in the past ten years, I've enjoyedintellectual discourse more passionately and soberlyin the Corner Bistro on West Fourth Street inManhattan; there, argument and discussion occurwithout being strangled by institutional politics, the

Hwnaafk at the Hanoi HiMon 217

size of staffs, the last promotion list, the number ofdepartment majors, culture justified by courseenrollments, the tenure crunch, and yes -whetherthose at table reflect the proportions set by affirma-tive action guidelines. At the bistro, ironically, themix of race and gender usually is legal although theonly price of admission is to know what you're talkingabout. The American academic community - whatJacques Barzun called The House of Intellect-hasnot in recent years been the best place to live for in-tellectuals. The house of intellect needs work, bothrestoration and remodeling.

The Humanities are also in the news, movingtoward the obituary columns. Newsweek carried apage and a half under the headline: "The HumanitiesCrisis." The Rockefeller Foundation report, TheHumanities in American Life, has recently beenpublished by the University of California Press - 192pages, price $12.50. 1 have not been inspired to readthis decennial tome of self-pity (usually a complaintthat the National Science Foundation receives an un-fair share of the money), but Newsweek declares thatthe report is critical of the "back to basics"movements, arguing that when minimum standardsof competence are imposed, reading and writing tendto become "instruments of survival, not skills forpleasure and learning."

In the first place, I very much doubt thatminimum competence is an instrument of survival.Semi-literacy and an ignorance of Western civiliza-tion may allow for some measure of success in theAmerican marketplace, but finally it will doom thecountry and the marketplace itself, Of course, everyteacher hopes his students will achieve those skillswhich bring pleasure to learning. What we need to

215 Ajfrud Kent

understand, however, is that far beyond rudimentaryskills and at the highest levels of competence, theHumanities are the instruments of survival. Ourscientific colleagues, the quantum physicists par-ticularly, may grasp this reality more readily than thehumanists themselves.

Not mere enrichment or pleasure, theHumanities are both intention and the Strategies ofintention -the instruments of survival. Whileteaching at the United States Air Force Academy twoyears ago, I met and heard former Americanprisoners of war, and I am going to use some of theirstories to illustrate the point. If our political andmilitary policies in Vietnam should be argued, what Itell you here has only to do with these prisoners - notthe politics of the war. No matter what you thinkabout Vietnam, I ask you now to think only about thePOWs. These American men, the POWs, mostlyfliers though not unlike ourselves, were kept so longand suffered so cruelly that their experience escapedthe war, became about itself, an experience not unlikethe Holocaust in its enormities; i.e., too stark andbrutal for historical and artistic transformation.Their insistence upon survival, their clinging tohumanness and the Divine years after they had reasonto cling to either, has separated them from us, or so itshould have separated them from us. The AmericanPOWs should belong now to some strange and evilAsian cult where torture merged into everydayness, acult so alien to the American experience that theyshould be lost not only to us but their own repatriatedselves. And yet, if they are different by the intimacyof their awful knowledge, the wonder is how intenselythey belong.

Humanities at the Hanoi Hilton 219

Dave Burroughs, a former fighter pilot, nowworks to coordinate some social service agencies in asmall Arizona town. Burroughs is a tall and gauntman, the lines on his face a thousand years older thanhis features. As we talked in my office, I wasastonished to learn that he is nearly ten years youngerthan 1. 1 asked Colonel Burroughs if he was ac-quainted with the Academy's survival training, aprogram of simulation that prepares the cadets fortheir own possible capture. He nodded. "There's noway to simulate it. There's no preparation for jail. Ortorture." He talked slowly, almost as if what he wasabout to say might embarrass me. "The so-called cor-ny stuff," he said. I raised my eyebrows. "I foundmyself praying," he said, "and you think abouthome." Then: "Best training for it is the Humanities.Not the pretend POW camp. Books. Plays. Poems.Philosophy. The big ideas. The persistence of values.The real lifesaving stuff."

As you may have read, many of those capturedremained in prison for five to nearly eight years withabout half that time in solitary confinement. Forbid-den to communicate, tortured for attempting to doso, they used a simple but laborious method to reacheach other. They reduced the alphabet to twenty-fiveletters, the letter "k" being omitted and substitutedfor by another letter. The letters were arranged in afive-by-five square so that the first taps indicated thelocation of the line and the second taps specified theletter. One of the POWs, Colonel John Reynolds,ordered his men to tap out whatever they knew abouthistory. Day by day and month by month, as theycould, painstakingly, they did so, and Reynoldssomehow contrived to write it down. Starved, in-jured, ill and beaten, they wrote their own history,

229 A Lfre Kern

made their own book to recreate a human past, theirwork on that book being less psychotherapy or aresponsible commander's way to maintain militarymorale than the need to create the book - such needboth felt and known, an act to transform and mitigatethe absurd brutality of their condition. Thatmanuscript exists in the Pentagon archives, and I in-tend to find a way to read it. I have a hunch that thishistory, written in solitude and pain and deprivation,exalts and celebrates the human possibility.

Yet another ex-POW, Jeremiah Denton, is nowthe right-wing candidate for the Senate fromAlabama. I'm sorry to say that I wouldn't vote forhim, but I do recommend his book. (And yet I am notsorry to report that since this essay was written, Ad-miral Denton won election to the Senate.) Dentonwas the POW compelled to participate in the televi-sion interview from Hanoi. While he was sayingwhatever he was being forced to say, he blinked hiseyes in Morse code to spell out t-o-r-t-u-r-e. As aprisoner, Jeremiah Denton wrote poetry for hisfellow prisoners - Christmas and Easter poems. Thepoems may not be good poetry, but one of them - forcontrast - sent me back to Yeat's "The Second Com-ing." The fines I sought seemed to characterize the na-tional psyche during the worst of the Vietnam years."Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/Mere anar-chy is loosed upon the world/The blood-dimmed timeis loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of in-nocence is drowned/The best lack all conviction,while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity." Yousee, what impresses mec about the POWs, JeremiahDenton's struggle to make poetry stretched across therack, is their will to hold the center. Fliers, engineers,technologists, broken in body with numbers soon to

Humanitis at the Hanoi Hilton 221

die, they used the Humanities - twenty centuries ofmind and spirit and will -to live.

What we learn from the POWs, a message theyhave spoken to us in the clearest of simple language,is both the reason and the way; the solutions in whichthe medicines are suspended are the medicines. To theauthors of the Rockefeller report, I say, "Yes, youcan bet your next NEH grant that the Humanities arethe instruments of survival." And at the HanoiHilton, survival meant to survive, to live and not todie.

For somebody of my generation, the signs arebad - not only in the Middle East but also in Europe:terrorist murder at the Munich Oktoberfest, kneecapsshot off in Italy, France a seeming haven to world ter-rorists and indifferent to the Neo-Nazi street gangsdetermined to kill Jews. Oil may be more valuablethan lives, and America has yet to show its ability toput an act together. Meanwhile, even as attention isbeing paid, the humanities continue to gather dust inuniversity committee rooms. In American collegesand universities, irrespective of department or course,every subject is about the humanities -or so, cer-tainly, they should be.

In "The World of Epictetus," Vice AdmiralJames Bond Stockdale, perhaps the most articulate ofthe former POWs, writes: "For me, the golden doorswere labeled history and the classics. The historicalperspective which enabled a man to take himself awayfrom all the agitation, not necessarily to see a rosy lin-ing, but to see the real nature of the situation hefaced, was truly a thing of value.... Education inthe classics teaches you that all organizations since thebeginning of time have used the power of guilt; thatcycles are repetitive; and that this is the way of the

222 Alffred Kerm

world.... And I believe a good classical educationand an understanding of history can best determinethe rules you should live by."

The humanities are too precious to be wasted inintramural committee meetings, much too precious tobe kept only by college professors; we do not considerourselves to be scholar-monks guarding themanuscripts while we pray for the next enlighten-ment. What I learned anew from the POWs is that thehumanistic tradition is both the milk and the honey.They prove the great notion: that what must be savedis also what will save us. Otherwise, Yeat's greatbeast, stirring in the desert -the desert, how pro-phetic! - will do more than slouch toward Bethlehem.It will arrive and devour.

James B. Stockdale

EDUCATION FOR LEADERSHIPAND SURVIVAL: THE ROLEOF THE PRESSURE COOKER

TuAKEN GENERALLY, my subject - Educa-tion for Leadership and Survival - falls easily withinthe comprehensive category of citizenship and moralobligation. My subtitle-The Role of the PressureCooker -projects an angle of vision that is scarelyless universal. Though it subtends a very personal arc,it points back to the Christian and classical past. I amall for the idea of progress, but I believe that all prog-ress is stimulated by an awareness of a heritage. "It isthe future that we are more like to think of im-mediately when the idea of progress is brought up,"says Robert Nisbet, "but it was only when menbecame conscious of a long past . .. that a con-sciousness of progressive movement from past topresent became possible." (History of the Idea ofProgress, New York, 1980, p. 323.)

Let me start with the over-obvious, boxed in acliche, wrapped in some truisms. The concept ofcitizenship is one of the fundamental ideas of Western

Admiral Stockdale delivered this Andrew R. Cecil Lectureon Moral Values in a Free Society in 1981. Reprinted withpermission from The Ethics of Citizenship, a University ofTexas at Dallas publication.

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224 Jamws Bi. Stackdale

civilization. It is an idea born with the Greeks morethan 2,500 years ago. It is an idea fundamental to theAmerican republic. It is an idea historically linked totwo others: freedom and organization. At its highest,citizenship achieves a balance between these twoelements necessary to the survival of society. At itsbest, citizenship finds an equilibrium between twoessential ingredients - that of rights, and that ofduties. When the idea of citizenship is losing its grip,one or the other of these elements becomes eroded.Either freedom is on the losing end, or the sense ofduty, of obligation, goes down the drain. We are liv-ing at a time when the idea of citizenship has beenseriously weakened. We have a strong sense of therights of a citizen. But we've lost much of the sense ofthe corresponding duties and obligations of citizen-ship. Meanwhile, the State behaves in a paradoxicalmanner. We find ourselves in what the philosopherscall a dialectical situation. Responding to popular de-mand for freedom and equality, the bureacracy of theState, swollen to the proportions of a Titan, enactsbattery after battery of laws and regulations to ensurethat freedom and equality. Result: the State's libertyis impaired as is that of its citizens. Like a giantGulliver the State lies on the ground, struggling tomove against the bonds of the very measures it hastaken to ensure freedom and equality. For "Freedomand equality are sworn enemies," say the Durants intheir little book The Lessons of History, "and whenone prevails the other dies." (New York, 1968, p. 20.)This is a hard saying. I will let you decide whatmeasure of truth it has.

One of the primary duties of citizenship is itsduty to education. By education I don't mean justschooling. The idea of education is broader than that,

Education for Leaders*l and Sun'fral 225

important though schooling is. Schooling is anecessary element of education, but not sufficientcompletely to define it.

Marriage and family fife are education. Sport,play, and entertainment are education. Religioustraining is education. Friendship is education.Military service is education. Any and every en-counter with nature and society is education. Somesocial scientists call education in this comprehensivesense "acculturation." I prefer to call it moresimply - "experience."

Now there is an element in education that I con-sider of crucial importance. There are learned namesfor the many varieties of this element, and some ofthese we might talk about as we go on. But for themoment I'll use the word "stress." Another name forit is "pressure." Stress or pressure in education and inlife has had bad reviews. I want to give it a good one.Doctors used to say stress was bad for you - one ofthe evils of competitive society - and should be avoid-ed. Nowadays some doctors say a moderate amountof stress is good for you, particularly the kind thatcomes from physical exercise. And there's a wholeschool of Running Doctors like George Sheehan whoget a kind of mystical experience from running amarathon and write books about it. (Cf. Sheehan,Running and Being, New York, 1978.) But all doctorssay if you're planning to get into this, get a stress testfirst.

Stress is essential to leadership. Living withstress, knowing how to handle pressure, is necessaryfor survival. It is related to a man's ability to wrestcontrol of his own destiny from the circumstancesthat surround him. Or, if you like, to prevail overtechnology. Tied up with this ability is something I

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can express in one word, "improvisation." I meanman's ability to prepare a response to a situationwhile under pressure.

George Bernard Shaw said that most people whofail complain that they are the victims of cir-cumstances. Those who get on in this world, he said,are those who go out and look for the right cir-cumstances. And if they can't find them they maketheir own.

To wrest or not to wrest control of one's destinyis a subject discussed by Will and Ariel Durant in thatlittle book I mentioned. In the chapter of theirLessons in History called "Growth and Decay," theystate that what determines whether the challenge ofhistory will or will not be met depends upon "thepresence or absence of creative individuals with aclarity of mind and energy of will (almost a definitionof genius), capable of effective responses to newsituations (almost a definition of intelligence)." Ithink the Durants' creative individual with energy ofwill, capable of effective responses to new situations,is the man I describe as one who can improvise underpressure.

My pitch is that if the energy of will and creativi-ty necessary to improvise under pressure can betaught, they are best learned in a stressful regime - ina crucible of pressure, whether that crucible be aclassroom or a total environment.

I suppose my coming down on the side of stress isno surprise to this audience. My life has been that of amilitary man, and pressure has been my constantcompanion. I began with a service academy educationback in the time when every teacher had to register agrade for every student at every class meeting. Thatmay not have been the best of all educational systems,

Education for Leadaahi ed Survval 227

but it was a stressful one. Afterward, I lived in stressfor thirty years, as a fighter pilot, experimental testpilot, and prisoner of war. My last Navy assignmentwas the presidency of the Naval War College, where Itaught a course "Foundations of Moral Obligation."Later I became president of a college which has forone hundred forty years educated young men in astressful regime -The Citadel.

My lifetime of experience in the pressure cooker,whether hemmed in by the iron laws of aerodynamicsat 40,000 feet or on the flight test ranges over the Mo-jave Desert, or hemmed in by the iron laws of extor-tion in the prisons of Hanoi, has led me to concludethat once one learns to accommodate the shocks of astressful existence, his adrenalin, will power, and im-agination are going to start churning to provide themaximum performance of the human mind. Thegeneration I taught at test pilot school at the NavalAir Test Center at Patuxent River, Maryland (JohnGlenn was one of my classmates), could have steppedright out of the pages of Tom Wolfe's recent book,The Right Stuff. In those days of the early 1950s, theexciting subject was supersonic flight. I taught anacademic course in thrust and drag in the high sub-sonic and lower supersonic flight regimes, and I canhonestly say that the intellectual mastery of thegraphs and the physical laws behind them were moreefficiently taught to my students in the stress of actualflight in a cockpit at 40,000 feet than in the class-room. By saying that, I am not just referring to thedifferences between the classroom and the lab, butrather to the more mentally stimulating of the twoenvironments.

But I don't want you to think that I am holdingup my experiences under stress as a simple model of

228 1Jame. 8. Stockdae

education for excellence and survival. I'll tell youmore about those experiences in a moment, but first Iwant to broaden the screen a bit lest you think stressand pressure are tied in a beneficial way to one way oflife alone, however important they may have been inthat life, which happened to be the life of a militaryman subjected perhaps to more direct and dire pres-sures than most. I want you to see with me that ourwhole culture, even what we call Western civilizationitself, is founded on the sufferings and greatness ofhuman beings and human societies under pressure.

It is a commonplace to say that our moralheritage has two sources -Judaic and Greek. Thesource book of the one is the Bible and the traditionof Judeao-Christianity associated with it. The originsof the other lie in the library of poetry, drama,politics, and philosophy of the Greek writers whoseworks have come down to us. If you are going to talkabout justice, you had better begin with Job andSocrates.

If ever a man was in a pressure situation, it isJob, the man from the land of Uz. He is a man, onceprosperous and happy, who has been struck by terri-ble misfortune. He has at a stroke lost sons anddaughters, servants and possessions. He has been in-fected with a loathsome disease. Once a rich man,now he sits on an ash heap, naked, scraping his fleshwith potsherds. He asks, "Why me, 0 Lord?" For hebelieves that the Almighty has caused or allowed thesecalamities to come upon him, and it makes no sense.He, Job, is a good man, a just man. What has hedone to deserve this evil? Job wants to talk to Godabout this. Is He not a just God?

Now, as we know, God does not answer Job inthe terms he would like. God does not acknowledge

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Job's virtue nor does He admit the situation is unfair.Instead, clothed in a whirlwind. He points to theawesome dimensions of the universe and asks Job ifhe, finite creature, could do anything like that. CanJob create the sea, guide the courses of the stars?Where was Job when God created heaven and earth?

In answer, Job is silent. He bows and puts hishand over his mouth. His silence is the silence offaith, of endurance. Job was put under stress greaterthan nearly any man could take, and he stood thetest.

Theologians have found many exalted lessons inthe story of Job. One of them is that we should nottry to measure the standards of the infinite with thoseof the finite - they are incommensurable. The lesson Itake from Job is simpler. Life is not fair. There is nomoral economy or balance in the nature of thingssuch that virtue is rewarded and vice punished. Thegood man hangs on and hangs in there. It is signifi-cant that the nearest Plato comes to a definition ofcourage in the dialogue Laches where Socrates is talk-ing to a general under whom he served is "Courage isendurance of the soul." The Greeks admired the boldstroke, the audacious dash, but reserved top creditfor the man that holds on under pressure. They knewby bitter experience what stress situations are. Theyknew what it means to break under pressure and whatit means to hold on. On the battlefield, says Aristotle,the greatest pressure is fear of death, and the tempta-tion is to run away. But the courageous man holdson.

Plato's dialogues' most compelling portraits ofSocrates show his master handling himself undersupreme stress. Defending himself on a capital charge

230 JameA. Stockdale

in court before hostile judges, he resists their pressureto get himself off the hook by agreeing to renounceteaching and inquiry. In prison, he resists pressure toescape laid on him by his rich pupil Crito who had themeans and the bribe money. (Athenians, "children ofthe laws," were not to be disillusioned by his failure toabide by the state's verdict, even though unjust.) Withdeath only hours away he has the equanimity to ad-vise his family and to discourse to his pupils on theSoul -on the reasons why a good man should notfear death. (Apology 29-30; Crito 50-151; Phaedo67-6M.)

The Greek city-state itself was a bit like apressure cooker. It was small, and life was pretty con-stricted within it. The pressure set up jealousies andenvies, both internal and external; this was one reasonwhy these political entities were always fighting withone another and exiling or deposing their ownleaders. The Greek city-state was always in danger ofbeing attacked by its neighbor. This was why militarytraining was so much a part of the Greek citizen's life.It is true that some city-states at certain times usedmercenaries or hired armies. But in general the latterwere considered inferior and untrustworthy when thegoing got tough. The citizen army was at the heart ofGreek city-state defense. Socrates did his military ser-vice in the Peloponnesian War, saw action atPotidaea and the siege of Delium, and passed up adecoration for valor so that another man might haveit.

Education in ancient Greece came down hard onphysical training. This training had an esthetic pur-pose. A body in good shape was fair to look upon.More than that, Greek gymnastics aimed at vic-tory -victory in war and in the competitive games of

Education for Leadership and Survival 231

peace. Greek gymnastic exercise was advantageousfor military proficiency. One of the famous Spartanexercises was dancing -in heavy armor. This helpedto develop the agility a man needed to wield his offen-sive weapons, the spear and short sword; it alsodeveloped the finesse to sidestep the thrusts of hisenemy. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead,while teaching at Harvard, said that if Plato were tocome to our country today, he would first ask tomeet, not a philosopher, but a championship-classboxer.

In times of peace -and there were few -there

were the competitions among the city-states. TheOlympic games, though only one of several periodiccompetitions, were the most famous of these con-tests. In fact, these games were so important to theGreeks that they suspended hostilities, if at war, forthe duration. Today some educators talk about theevil effects of competition instilled into our children,of the need to avoid developing a competitive spirit inour youth. But the Greeks, whose humanism thesesame experts profess to admire, were the most com-petitive people that ever lived. They wanted to excelin everything. Their motto was ai en aristeuein,"always to be the best." Their public games includedcompetition not only in racing, jumping, javelinthrowing, boxing, and wrestling, but also in musical,poetic, literary, and drama contests. In one of thebest known and most fun-filled dialogues of Plato,The Symposium, the party scene is the celebration ofthe prize the host Agathon had just won for writingthe best tragedy. To the Greeks the heart of the gamewas agon -competition, stress, pressure, struggle towin. (Later we'll see a contemporary scholar's com-ment on agon in education.) They like to point out

232 Jones &. Stockdeie

that the philosopher Heraclitus, to them already anancient and legendary figure, had claimed that bothmusic and science had their beginning in stress - theworld itself composed of opposite forces, tensionspulling against each other, like the strain of a drawnbow, resulting in a comparative stability or per-manence - as the strings of a lyre give forth harmonywhen they are pulled two ways, stretched in harmonicproportions over the sounding board of the instru-ment by the pegs and the tailboard fastenings. Thebeautiful repose of the Greek temple was seen by theintelligentsia as the product of perfectly calculated ar-chitectural stress.

Far more ancient than the dialogues of Plato oreven the philosophy of Heraclitus is Homer's greatstory of Odysseus, soldier and navigator. In theOdyssey we read of his long captivity under Calypsoand his twelve-year voyage, fraught with a score ofdeadly perils, from that rocky island where he washeld enslaved, to Ithaca, where his faithful wifePenelope and his son Telemachus were waiting forhim. We all know Homer's trick of tagging things,men and gods, with a characteristic label. It is alwaysthe wine-dark sea, always the grey-eyed Athena,always the rosy-fingered dawn. Odysseus'characteristic trait is resourcefulness, the ability toimprovise in a pressure situation. Polumetis, Homercalls him, full of survival tricks, never at a loss nomatter how lethal the situation may be. A familiarepisode in the story illustrates Odysseus' resource-fulness under stress. Held captive by the one-eyedgiant Polyphemus, in his narrow cave, Odysseusknow that he and his men are doomed to a horribledeath. (That's a fair amount of pressure. DoctorJohnson told Boswell that when a man know he'sgoing to be hanged in a month, it concentrates his

Education for Leadmhlp and SuWvla 233

mind wonderfully.) Odysseus had only a couple ofdays. He waited until the giant was in a drunkensleep, then took a stake he had hidden in straw,heated it and plunged it into his captor's one eye,blinding him so that the Trojan war veteran and whatwas left of his crew could escape. Odysseus, theresourceful, kept his head; he had the ability to im-provise under pressure.

A more profoundly moving story lies at the baseand heart of Christianity itself -the death of Jesus onthe Cross. By comparison, Socrates' death was mer-ciful and dignified. Death by crucifixion was verycruel. Reserved for slaves and the most ignominiousof criminals, this mode of execution killed by weaken-ing the chest muscles by the downward drag of thebody so that life was slowly extinguished by gradualand painful suffocation. What the stress was uponthat man who hung there is hard for us to imagine -maybe not quite so hard for those of us who have ex-perienced physical torture. The Gospel story tells usthat despite the pressure to defend Himself at Histrial, Jesus did not do so. On the cross, He kept silentin the face of his tormentors' jokes. He did cry out, "Ithirst," and, when the anguish became more than aman could bear, "My God, My God, why hast Thouforsaken me?" But at the end He said as one wouldspeak of a duty discharged, a mission completed, "Itis finished."

Ernest Hemingway, hardly a model Christian,wrote a story called "Good Friday." It is a story aboutthe aftermath of Calvary. Some Roman soldiers whowere in charge of the execution are drinking and talk-ing of the events of the day. They are pretty drunk.One soldier can only mumble over and over, "I tellyou, He looked pretty good in there today." No

234 JAmes A. Steckdale

accident that Hemingway's moral ideal was "graceunder pressure." He tried to see that his heroesmeasured up to it.

In the Christian Middle Ages, especially as theywere drawing to their close, alchemy was all the rageamong a certain class of learned men. Alchemy wasbased on the old idea of the hermetic that had comedown from ancient Greece and Egypt and had beencolored by Christian sacramental teaching. The ideaof the hermetic was two-fold. It meant somethingsealed off -hermetically sealed, as we say. And it alsomeant magic -particularly magical transformation.You put something in a crucible or a retort and yousubjected it to certain presssures like heat, or doses ofsulphur and mercury. If you were lucky or wise orboth, some kind of creative transformation would takeplace. In physical terms, this referred to the changingof base metals into precious ones - lead into gold.But the top grade alchemical philosophers were notcontent with mere physical crucibles and crystalretorts you could hold in your hand. They were aimingat even more important things. Paracelsus thought itmight be possible to create a human being (homun-culus) in the laboratory - something today people areagain getting uneasy about. The higher alchemyaimed not at mere physical change but at moral andspiritual transformation. The crucible and retortbecame symbols of creative growth. Fire and the twinelements sulfur and mercury came to represent theoutside pressures exerted upon the human soul in itsconfined place. In extreme cases, the fire might be ofhellish origin. But if the soul in question were strongenough, inventive enough, not mere passive matter,that spirit might undergo an alchemical change -ametamorphosis of the spirit in which the ordinary

Education for Leadership and Survival 235

stuff of humanity could turn into something precious,emerging as if from a tightly sealed cocoon.

This alchemy comparison may seem farfetched,but I find it not a bad fit with the experience severalof us Americans had as long-term prisoners of theNorth Vietnamese in the dungeons of Hanoi. (I per-sonally was there for nearly eight years, more thanhalf of that time under the extreme discipline of tor-ture and solitary confinement.) I think I know nowwhat the old alchemists meant when they said thatsometimes it took a little hellfire to effect the magicaltransformation in the crucible. A prison is the mostmerciless case of sealing off a human soul in a con-fined space. For most people it is a degrading experi-ence. It was for me too, but something more. In thattiny space of confinement, sealed off not only fromthe rest of the world but even from my fellowprisoners and comrades, I had an humble experienceof moral and spiritual enlightenment. Although I amno match for certain great men of history, I find I hadprecedent and noble company.

The prison where Socrates awaited execution inAthens in the year 399 B.C. was not a marblecolumned palace as some of the Italian Renaissancemasters painted it. Probably it was no more than afair-sized cave in a hillside with iron bars across theopening. Here Socrates gave his last discourse to hisstudents, many of whom wept, Plato tells us, as theylistened to the master's words. He told them that weshould not fear death, for death is the liberation ofthe soul from the body. During life, the soul lives inthe body as if it were a prisoner, a caged bird. Withdeath, the prison door is opened, the bird is set free.Socrates quotes a line from the old Orphic priests whosaid that the body is a tomb of the soul, the place of

236 James &. Steckdake

corruption. But the place of corruption is also theplace of rebirth, of resurrection, freeing the spirit totake its rightful place in the divine realm from whichit came. So the wise man does not fear death. It is notan evil. No harm can befall a good man.

In Italy, in the early centuries of Christian Rome,a man named Boethius was imprisoned by his em-peror Theodoric the Ostrogoth. He was executed on acharge of treason in the year 524 A.D. This manBoethius was both a statesman and a scholar. He hadbeen prime minister to the emperor. His scholarlyworks would have an immense influence on subse-quent medieval philosophy. His commentaries onAristotle's logic became standard texts in the univer-sities. According to Boethius' written description ofhis imprisonment, he sits there in captivity lamentinghis misfortune, the loss of his honors and riches, theconfiscation of his library with bookshelves of glassand ivory. Suddenly a beautiful lady appears to him.She is Lady Philosophy. She comforts him by tellinghim many things. That the world is governed bydivine wisdom, not by blind chance. That we mustnot give too much importance to Fortune, for she is afickle lady, taking away with one hand what she hasgiven with the other. We must not become upset whenshe takes good things away from us. They were neverours to begin with. True happiness does not comefrom externals, she reminds him, but from within.True, life with its sudden falls of fortune is no easything. But would a good soldier ighting a tough bat-tle stop to say to himself how unhappy he is? A wiseman like Boethius ought not to bewail his struggleswith fortune any more than a brave soldier should bescared by the noises of battle. Lady Philosophy re-minds the prisoner of the wisdom of Socrates-thatno evil can befall a good man.

Educatien for Leadenh~p and Survval 237

Boethius wrote his book while in prison. It waspublished after his death, and became one of thegreat Christian classics -The Consolation ofPhilosophy.

About 400 years ago a Spanish officer lay inprison, a captive of the Moors of Algeria. He was aveteran of the battle of Lepanto, the last great navalfight in which ships were powered by oars. The Turkshad been encroaching on the Mediterranean with theaim of seizing Cyprus from Venice. But Don John ofAustria, leading the ships of Spain and the VenetianRepublic, destroyed the Turkish fleet in a fierceengagement from which this Spanish officer emergeda cripple. He got no glory out of it for he was sooncaptured by Algerian pirates and held captive for fiveyears with several of his comrades. At first he wasprofoundly depressed in his captivity, but graduallydiscovered in himself the power of leadership, theability to organize and to direct men. He kept hiscomrades busy with tasks that took their minds offtheir sorry condition. He organized six elaborateescape attempts, all of which failed. At last he wasreleased and returned to his native land of Spainwhere he expected the king to recognize his services.But the king and people were tired of wars and bat-tles; they wanted to hear no more about it. Embit-tered, the officer withdrew to his home and began toscribble a comic story about a witless Don who fan-cied himself a knight errant of old and rode all overSpain seeking to conquer giants and rescue damsels indistress. The story grew under the fingers of his onegood hand, and at last it was published under the titleDon Quixote. The officer's name was Miguel deCervantes.

238 Jams B. Slockdae

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus was foremostamong my consolations of philosophy in the pressurecooker of Hanoi. Like Cervantes he was a cripple.Unlike the author of Don Quixote, he was a slave. Atleast, he had been a slave until a generous master sethim free so that he could teach philosophy in ancientRome. How I got to know Epictetus I explained in aletter I wrote in 1975 to Joseph Brennan, then Pro-fessor of Philosophy, Barnard College, ColumbiaUniversity, who had written to me asking about thecomfort and strength philosophical readings hadgiven me throughout my eight years in prison. I ex-panded these thoughts and added to them later in anarticle I wrote for The Atlantic Monthly titled "TheWorld of Epictetus" (April 1978). For what followsI'll draw on the letter. (The full text is in J.G. Bren-nan, The Education of a Prejudiced Man, New York,1977. See also his "Hermetically Sealed" in Perspec-tives and Personalities, Essays in Honor of ClaudeHill, Heidelberg, 1978.)

I came into the Navy as a Naval Academy Mid-shipman in 1943 at the age of 19. For the next twentyyears or so I was a rather technically oriented person.I was a seagoing destroyer officer, an aviator, a land-ing signal officer, a test pilot and academic instructorat the test pilot school, a many-times-deployed fighterpilot, and ultimately a Squadron Commander of asupersonic F-8 Crusader outfit.

In 1960 1 was sent to Stanford University for twofull years' study in politics/history/economics inpreparation for later assignments in politico-militarypolicymaking. I loved the subject matter, but noticedthat in many courses my interest would peak at aboutthe time the professor would say, "We're getting intophilosophy-let's get back to the subject." I had more

Fducatlon for Leadwsahp and Surviva 239

than adequate time to get the expected Master'sDegree, and suggested to my advisor in my secondyear that I sign up for some courses over in thephilosophy comer of the quadrangle. He was dead setagainst it-thought it would be a waste of my time.He said, "That's a very technical subject-it wouldtake two terms to learn their peculiar vocabulary."Finally, after I persisted, he said, "It's up to you."

It was my good fortune on that first morningthat I wandered through the hails of the PhilosophyDepartment, grey-haired and in civilian clothes, tocome by an open office whose occupant asked if hecould be of help. When I told him that I was agraduate student technically in the humanities butwith no formal philosophy background, he couldscarcely believe it. When I told him I was a naval of-ficer, he asked me to have a seat. He had been in theNavy in World War II. His name was Philip Rhine-lander. As a Harvard lawyer he had practiced inBoston for several years before Pearl Harbor,volunteered for war service at sea, and thereafter tookhis PhD at Harvard. After tours as a dean at Harvardhe was back in the classroom at his own request. Hewas in the midst of his two-term "personal" course:"The Problems of Good and Evil." This he had builtupon the lessons of the Book of Job ("Life is notfair"). He offered to let me enter the course, and toovercome my shortcomings of background, to giveme an hour of private tutoring each week. What adeparture from other departments! (In some, PhDcandidates sat outside their advisor's office for hourson end awaiting a ten-minute conversation.) I lovedRhinelander's class, and particularly our hour to-gether each week. I remember how patient he was intrying to get me to realize the full implications ofHume's "Dialogues on Natural Religion."

a ----.-- -- ~ -.-- --- -' . - ---.--------

240 Jan 5. StMckdak

As we parted after our last session, he reached upto his bookshelf and said something like, "As Iremember it, you are a military man-take thisbooklet as a memento of our hours together. It pro-vides moral philosophy applicable to yourprofession." It was Epictetus' Enchiridion.

That night I started to peruse my gift. I recog-nized nothing that applied to the career I had known.I was a fighter pilot, an organizer, a motivator ofyoung aviators, a martini drinker, a golf player, atechnologist -and this ancient rag talked about notconcerning oneself with matters over which one hadno control, etc. Charitably put, I thought it irrele-vant. Nevertheless I read and remembered almost allof it- if for no other reason than that it was given tome by a man I respected as a human being, a scholar,and a teacher.

About three years after I had said good-bye toRhinelander, while in the midst of my second combattour against North Vietnam as a Wing Commander, Ipuled off a target one September morning in themidst of heavy flak when all the lights came on (firewarning, hydraulic failure, electrical failure, etc.). AsI sped over the treetops it became immediately ap-parent that I had lost my flight controls - by reflex ac-tion I pulled the curtain and ejected -and was almostimmediately suspended in the air 200 feet above avillage street, in total silence except for rifle shots andthe whir of bullets past my ear. So help me, in thosefleeting seconds before I landed among the waitingcrowd I had two vivid thoughts: (1) Five yearsto wait (I had studied enough modem Far Easthistory and talked to enough Forward Air Controllersin the south to appreciate fully the dilemma of Viet-nam - I turned out to be an optimist by two and one-

Eduwatlen for L.eraW and Saaryhwl 241

half years), and (2) 1 am leaving that technologicalworld and entering the world of Epictetus.

The world view of the Stoics, Professor Rhine-lander had joked, was that their environment was abuzz saw in which human will was the only salvation.I was to spend over four years combating a veritablebuzz saw (until the torture and extortion machine wasset in idle in the late autumn of 1969) and over threemore years of simple deprived detention of the sortone would expect in a primitive hostile country. Alltold, four years were to be spent in solitary confine-ment, nearly half of it in leg irons. Throughout, until1970, every effort was to be made to break my will, tomake me a cat's paw in propaganda schemes. Real orfabricated "violations of the established regulationsfor criminals' detention" (e.g., tapping on the walls toanother prisoner) would result in torture, with theend aim of sequential (1) confession of guilt, (2) beg-ging for forgiveness, (3) apology, and (4) atonement(signing an antiwar statement). A similar sequencewould be set up with particular gusto if I were foundto be exercising leadership of others via the tap code("inciting other criminals to oppose the camp authori-ty").

The stress situation was thus framed in the abovecontext. I was crippled (knee broken, partial use ofarm), alone, sick (weight down 50 pounds), depressed(not so much from anticipating the next pain as fromthe prospect of my eventually losing my honor andself-respect), and helpless except for will. What con-ditions could be more appropriate for Epictetus' ad-monitions? As a soldier, I had bound myself to amilitary ethic:

242 JuA . Stockdde

Remember that you are an actor in a drama of such sort asthe author chooses-if short, then in a short one: if long,then in a long one. If it be his pleasure that you shouldenact a poor man, see that you act it well; or a cripple, or aruler, or a private citizen. For this is your business-to actwell the given part; but to choose it belongs to another.

I was crippled:

Sickness is an impediment to the body; but not to the willunless itself pleases. Lameness is an impediment to the leg,but not to the will; and say this to yourself with regard toeverything that happens. For you will find it to be an im-pediment to something else, but not truly to yourself.

I was dependent on my extortionists for life support,and soon learned to ask for nothing to avoid demandsfor "reciprocity":

Whoever then would be free, let him wish nothing, lethim decline nothing, which depends on others; else he mustnecessarily be a slave.

I could stop misery at any time by becoming a puppet;was it worth the shame?

If some person had delivered up your body to some passer-by, you would certainly be angry. And do you feel noshame in delivering up your own mind to any reviler, to bedisconcerted and confounded?

Relief from boils, heat, cold, broken bones was"available" for the asking - for a price. What should Isay?

If I can get them with the preservation of my own honorand fidelity and self-respect, show me the way and I willget them; but if you require me to lose my own propergood, that you may gain what is no good, consider howunreasonable and foolish you are. (Enchirdion, XVII, IX,XIV, XXVII, XXIV.)

Education f. Leadersh~p ad Sun'A'l 243

Epictetus was not the only valuable philosophicmemory in my predicament: Job (Why me ... Whynot me?), Descartes' bifurcation of mind and body,and many other readings were invaluable. Some ofmy prison mates had deep religious convictions whichserved them well, some drew resolve from their con-cepts of political virtue, and so on in a broad spec-trum of varying levels of sophistication. I thought ofGod, and I thought of country too, and that helped.But my "secret weapon" was the security I felt in an-choring my resolve to those selected portions ofphilosophic thought that emphasized human dignityand self-respect. Imprisonment under dire stress wasfor me, as it has been for certain others, the cruciblein which an ordinary man was made to realize thatthere was something in him that under pressure couldtranscend the ordinary. In that hermetic closed space,sealed off from human contact, subjected topressures of outward forces that reached into thesoul, I experienced my own illumination. I wouldnever be the same again. Jack Kerouac, King of theBeats, is not my kind of man, but I am with him whenhe says "Prison is where you promise yourself theright to live."

Prison is not the only sealed-off place in whichdevelopment of the spirit under pressure may occur.Any ship is a cutoff world under stress, and it is noaccident that our greatest American novel, Melville'sMoby Dick, rose from the close confinement of itsauthor in a succession of whaling and naval vesselsthat did not bring him back to these shores for threeyears. The cockpit of the plane, the command center,the chess board, the sports arena-these and otherclosed spaces can be the scene of creative trans-formation of self. in science there is the laboratory,

244 AnonaDA Sgockdale

its test tubes and crucibles; in religion, the ark and thetabernacle. I need not mention that the miraculousdevelopment of human life itself takes place in thesealed-off space of the womb.

I am not claiming that we should base educationon training people to be in prison, but I am sayingthat in stress situations, the fundamentals, the hard-core classical subjects, are what serve best. I'm not theonly prisoner who discovered that so-called practicalacademic exercises in "how to do things" were uselessin that fix. The classics have a way of saving you thetrouble of prolonged experiences. You don't have togo out and buy pop psychology self-help books.When you read the classics in the humanities, youbecome aware that the big ideas have been around along time, despite the fact that they are often servedup today in modern psychological "explanations" ofhuman action as novel and "scientific." We didn'thave to wait for Horney, Erikson, and Maslow to giveus the notion of self-fulfillment or self-actualization.They were there in Aristotle's treatises on psychologyand ethics all along. Of course, modern psycho-therapists have to touch them up a bit to bring themup to date, by injecting a heady dose of personal in-dividualism. This would have puzzled Aristotle. Hewould not have understood what good it does to dis-cover "the real Me." He thought that self-realizationcould not be achieved without service to the com-munity, in his case, the city-state. His time was notwhat Tom Wolfe calls a "Megeneration.

Can we educate for leadership? That's a toughquestion. It's related to - it's really a part of - asimilar question: Can moral values, can moral ex-cellence be taught? Theres a great deal of concernabout that today. We hear that we must get back to

Ed'jcadox fo, Lmodenh* and SurvhwJ 245

teaching moral values to the young. But can they betaught? Socrates raised the question in the Meno, anddeclined to give a straight answer. His pitch wentsomething like this. It seems that moral values can'tbe taught, for if they could, why is it that fine menlike Pericles, who have given their children the besthome environment and schooling, have no goodsons? It seems that "up to the present at least," hesaid, moral excellence must be considered as some-thing we are endowed with, a gift from the gods, likepersonal beauty or blue eyes and curly hair. But that"up to the present" is important. Socrates does notclose the door entirely on the question. Maybe if wecould work out a science of the good, in which amodel state based on justice will help us understandhow to educate for the good, we might just do it, wemight just be able to teach something about moral ex-cellence and make it stick. So Plato follows the Menowith the Republic, in which he constructs just such amodel state in which each is given his or her due. I say"her" advisedly because women as well as men willreceive top education in Plato's ideal city-state. Andas a military man I'm giad to know that Plato reservesa high status and important function for graduates ofhis equivalent of West Point and Annapolis.

Aristotle has a lot of common sense to offer onthis question of the teaching of moral excellence andleadership. His answer to the question has been takenup into the Western tradition, modified by Locke inthe 17th century and by Rousseau in the 18th, thenshaped by our own founding fathers, particularly byThomas Jefferson, author of our Declaration of In-dependence. We are not born good, but we naturallyare adapted to become so. And this adaptation meansbuilding of character by habit and training on a basis

246 James . Stockdae

of free choice. "Neither by nature nor contrary tonature do the moral excellences arise in us," Aristotlesays, "rather we are adapted by nature to receivethem, and made perfect by habit." (NichomacheanEthics, 1103a 24-26.)

Aristotle was much interested in the role of stressand pressure in life situations, because of his pro-found concern with the distinction between actionswhich are performed in force-situations and thosefreely chosen. There are some actions in which theagent plays no part, he says, and gives the examplesof hostages taken prisoner and a man tied up so thathe cannot move. A true human act is one in which in-tention and free choice are present. But he wasespecially interested in situations in which compulsionand choice can coexist. Even though I may be aprisoner or a hostage, some measure of freedom re-mains to me. In our situation in Hanoi we werehelplessly confined and at the mercy of the enemy.Yet a crucial measure of freedom remained to us. Wecould collaborate with the enemy or could refuse todo so. True, he had the power to make us confess toshameful things by torture. (The method wassimple-arms tied behind the back and the rope pro-gressively tightened as blood circulation was stoppeduntil the strongest man would scream in pain like ababy.) But we still had the power to make him beginall over again the next day. Time and again one of ourmen would come back from interrogation ashamedbecause he had given up information under torture.By the tap code we'd tell him that we had done thatand worse. "There are some instances," says Aristo-tle, "when a man acts improperly under a straingreater than human nature can bear and which no onecould endure." But he adds, "Yet there are perhaps

Edsgcatln for Leadership and Survival 247

also acts which no man could possibly be compelledto do, but rather than do them he would accept themost terrible suffering and death." (NichomacheanEthics, 111, 11 10a 23-28.) In Hanoi I realized that mycaptors had all the power. I couldn't see how I was go-ing to keep my honor and self-respect intact. The onething I held on to was my knowing that if you don'tgive up, compromise, and literally "spill your guts,"you can't be had. Compromises pile up when you'rein a pressure situation in the hands of a skilled extor-tionist. You can be had if you make that first com-promise, offer to make that "deal," or "meet themhalf way."

It may seem strange for someone with a deepcommitment to the humanities in education to defendthe old Plebe fear practices at Annapolis, the U.S.Naval Academy. That's a rough year. The midship-man is studying under great pressure, and he is con-stantly subjected to personal stresses that some mightthink of as pointless harassment. But that year ofeducation under stress was of great personal survivalvalue to me. I recall about a month after I was backfrom Vietnam one of my former prison mates camerunning to me after a reunion at the Naval Academy.He told me with glee. "This is really great, you won'tbelieve how this country has advanced. They've prac-tically done away with the Plebe Year at the Academyand they've got computers in the basement of Ban-croft Hall." I thought, "Hell, if there was anythingthat helped us get through those eight years it wasPlebe Year, and if anything screwed up that war, itwas computers."

To me the greatest educational fallacy is that youcan get it without stress. The student revolts in thecolleges and universities of the 1960s forced faculty

248 James D. Steckdale

and administrators to back down, to take away re-quirements, to call off pressures, make things easy.No more required hard science. No more requiredforeign languages. "Take-home tests" and cozy chatstook the place of rigorous final examinations. Stu-dents were allowed to take what they wanted. Whatthey wanted was social science, urban development,psychology. What they didn't want was history,mathematics, physics, formal logic, classics, andmodem foreign languages. Any reform demandedand secured was always in the direction of easingpressure, lowering standards, diminishing rigor-never increasing it. Result? More than a decade ofpoorly educated young men and women. In responseto the economic pressures of the 1970s, the facultyknuckle-under process has begun to turn around. Butit will take a lot of turning before education gets backon the rails.

There is a fascinating essay by Dr. Walter Ong inDaedalus magazine, titled "Agonistic Structures inAcademia." (Daedalus, Fall 1974, No. 4.) His pur-pose is to offer background material that would helpeducators analyze the campus struggles of the 1960s.One of the most important factors involved, saysOng, is the disappearance of a stabilizing stressful en-mity that for 1,600 years had pitted students againstteachers in ceremonial combat. Ong quotes an oldGerman who in the late 1960s was teaching in a publichigh school in New York. After a trying day in class,he was heard to exclalm, "Ach, these boys want me tobe their friend, they should know that the teachershould always be their enemy."

Until recent decades, ceremonial combat in theeducational process had been part of Western culture.The student-teacher face-off had been standard since

259 Jams B. Stvockdazte

of this educational operation. Ong says that coeduca-tion was incompatible with any of the elementsabove. I suppose that might be challenged by someeducators today, but I am encouraged when Iremember that today most advanced feminists will de-fend the viability of the single sex college, male orfemale. Ong's position seems reasonable to me whenhe argues that the agonistic style took shape inresponse to uniquely masculine needs.

The agonistic way, including test of manhood,has all but passed from the modern scene. But for whatit's worth, as viewed by one who has presided over asingle-sex institution where rites of passage are stiffobserved, the self-imposed stress of a structured,disciplined, semi-autonomous student hierarchy yieldsmany good results. Education there becomes an ir-reversible process which equips its graduates with cer-tain items of what some would call emotional baggage.Picked up along the way are concerns with loyalty,with commitment, a capacity for passion, for idealism.Such a stressful educational environment spurs agrowth of conscience and also of salutary egoism.

Jacob Burckhardt, the 19th century Swisshistorian, thought well of "that enigmatic mixture ofconscience and egoism" he called honor. Althoughfrom many standpoints egoism is an impurity, andconscience alone would be nobler, he neverthelessacknowledged the utility and power of the blend.Egoism gives conscience staying power.

"Honor," writes Burckhardt, "is often what re-mains after faith, love, and hope are lost. (TheCivilization of the Renaissance in Italy, London,1929, p. 428.)

From my own experience, I think he's right. Asense of honor under pressure can outlast them all.

Educatin for Leadiship and Swrvva 249

the early stages of the Christian era. Saint Augustinedescribed the stand-off methodology in his Confes-sions. Dialectic was the struggle of opposites, anddialectic was the standard method of education in theuniversities of the high Middle Ages and of theRenaissance.

Dr. Ong describes these agonistic structures ascomposed of four elements. The first was that of oraldisputation. Students recited; they seldom wrotepapers. They stood and defended their theses in loudclear voices or they attacked the school solutions. Theprofessor was the sounding board, the sparring part-ner, and in the end the judge with authority whoawarded the palm of praise or delivered the knockoutblow. It was a dialectical process of argumentationthrough opposites, a ritual by which students learnedsubjects by fighting over them.

A second element was invariably a harsh physi-cal regime. Classes started in darkness at 6 a.m., orbefore. The rules of behavior were strict. (Has any-one ever seen a schoolmaster portrayed inRenaissance art without his trusty bundle of switchesat his side?) A third element of this agonistic structurewas the pressure of constant translation; all of thisoral disputation was conducted in the tribal languageof intellectuals, Latin, the language of doctors andlawyers and metaphysicians. This language require-ment in itself imposed a discipline, a structure, and astressful learning situation. Ong says that the achieve-ment of learning Latin, that tightly disciplinedlanguage, well enough to argue in it - indeed to de-fend one's academic reputation in it - became a sortof puberty rite for the Western-educated male inalmost every century of this Christian era, save ourown. The fourth element was the all-male character

MILITARY ETHICS

Rokctkw on pdincp~s- the professio of eNm miliwy leierAhi.eshkia pwtces war nd moralfty. edunating tin ctheesoN~w

Tet and disply ine awe set in Tiam. Cover art by Laindo Dodroi.Editoril Ruader: Major Donald Anderson, USAF. National DefaeUniversity. Editor: Janis bren Hietals.

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