Is military integrity a contradiction in terms?
by John T. Reed

The one thing we were NOT going to do I told him was have me sign a false inventory. He had it typed with the false information a third time, still with the CO ranting and raving at me in front of a room full of bemused Army clerks. Once again, I modified it before signing. He did not try a fourth time—with me anyway.

I later heard through the grape vine that there was a fourth version on which they forged my signature.

I also heard that they had forged my signature on the motor vehicle status report I refused to sign in that same unit. Apparently my name had been on the Day Report as motor officer that day so my signature had to be on the motor vehicle status report for that day as well, regardless of my refusal to sign it.

This is not the world’s biggest deal. I just tell the story to illustrate that false documents are signed routinely and daily throughout the U.S. military officer corps and refusing to sign a false document because it is false is considered nutty by lifers.

In other words, that statement “that unquestioned integrity is an essential trait of the military leader” on page 88 of my Bugle Notes is total bullshit. Unquestioned obedience, including when ordered to sign false documents, is the true version of what the de facto “essential trait” of a U.S. military officer is. “Unquestioned integrity” is only what ought to be “an essential trait of the military leader.”

Self-righteous arrogance

Notwithstanding the routine daily signing of false documents throughout the U.S. military officer corps, the typical reaction of a U.S. officer to even the slightest suggestion that such officers are not paragons of integrity is stiffed-necked, self-righteous indignation and outrage.

Here’s an example. I once overheard a captain bragging about a conversation he had with a prospective landlord. He was in uniform when he applied for an apartment near Fort Monmouth, NJ. The landlord told him what the security deposit would be and the captain angrily and indignantly responded, pointing to his captain’s bars, “There’s your security deposit right there!”

I was also a landlord at the time, although not his. Had a U.S. military officer ever tried that line with me, I would have laughed in his face. Indeed, I would probably seek additional security from such a tenant on the grounds that they tend to move to a different continent or at least a different state when they move out. That makes it harder to collect money owed. I am a nationally-known expert on rental property and the author of many books on the subject.

The officer who demanded that I sign the false arms inventory in Vietnam was a captain. The company commander who signed the false training schedules at Fort Bragg was a captain. Ernest Medina, the company commander whose men committed the My Lai massacre and who lied about it afterward, was also a captain.

‘Orders’

In my landlord days, I did have one experience with a U.S. military officer showing how important integrity was to him. He was a Navy officer assigned to the Philadelphia Navy Yard. He lived in one of my employer’s apartments. He gave notice he was breaking the lease. It had a job-transfer clause that said you could get out of the lease if you were being transferred more than 40 miles away from the complex.

I told him he was not eligible to invoke that clause. He yelled at me angrily and showed me “orders” that he claimed indicated he was being transferred to Kansas City, MO. The papers did, indeed, have the word “orders” printed on them. I looked at them and said,

Lieutenant, you’re a liar. Those are separation-from-the-service orders. You are voluntarily getting out of the Navy. And when you get out you are authorized travel pay from the Philadelphia Navy Yard to Kansas City—because Kansas City is either your current “home of record” in military files or because you entered the Navy in Kansas City. No one is ordering you to go to Kansas City. Do you think you are the only person here who was ever in the military?

Turned out he was actually buying a home in our area from the same company that I managed apartment complexes for. Oh, also, a Navy lieutenant is the rank equivalent of an Army captain, the rank that is so honest that they claim they should not have to put up tenant security deposits.

Poll

One of my West Point classmates told me he saw a poll in Army Times or some similar periodical in which 67% or some such of career Army officers admitted that they had signed false documents during their careers. I laughed and said, “And 33% are so corrupt they even lie on anonymous polls.”

Hackworth’s comment

On page 15 of Colonel David Hackworth’s book About Face, journalist Ward Just quotes Hackworth as saying about the post-World War II Army

In this new Army, no one could afford to tell the truth, make an error, or admit ignorance.

That “new Army” is the only one I was ever in.

‘Counseling’

Whenever I refused to sign false documents or refused to go along with some other (OVUM) Officially Voluntary but Unofficially Mandatory indignity like attendance at so-called “command-performance” parties held by superiors, I was sent to a high-ranking officer for “counseling.” Signing false documents is an example of what I call OPUM, that is, stuff that is Officially Prohibited but Unofficially Mandatory.

I found these “counseling” sessions to be comically uniform no matter where I was in the world—as if every career military officer had taken a course in how to rationalize abandoning one’s integrity and turning into a total boot licker. Here’s how they all rationalized it and tried to get me to rationalize it.

Lieutenant Reed, you can’t change the Army. It may surprise you to learn that I was unhappy about some of the same things that you are unhappy about when I was a young lieutenant. I remember the time I had tickets to an NBA playoff game and the colonel scheduled a party for the same night. I was really angry when my company commander told me I had to go to the party. I told him I wouldn’t. But I had a good CO and he counseled me like I’m counseling you and it saved my career. I went to the party. I figured I had made my point by complaining to the CO about it.

You have to bide your time, Lieutenant Reed. You can’t change things when you’re a lieutenant. You have to play the game until you reach high enough rank that you have the power to change things. You have to pick your battles. This one isn’t worth it.

Let me give you a prayer that’s helped me, Lieutenant Reed. God grant me the courage to change what I can change, the patience to accept what I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference. I have friends who got out of the Army. They say it’s the same in civilian corporations. It’s the way it is everywhere.

So what do you say, Lieutenant Reed? Can we count on you to become a team player? Everyone else can’t be out of step.

When none of that worked, they would threaten me with bad efficiency reports, not getting promoted, and “things not going so easy on you.”

Here is my point-by-point response to the Army officer corps’ standard “counseling”-rationalization session.

In a 4/7/08 Newsweek story about Hillary’s sniper fire lie, Jonathan Alter says,

We know why politicians lie when they get in trouble: They think the consequences of telling the truth are too severe to bear.

Career military officers are politicians. At the lower ranks, they are like office politicians in civilian companies. As they move up, they become like the corporate politicians who maneuver and form alliances and play Machiavellian games to advance their careers. Refusing to lie when a superior wants you to ends the career of an officer. You may think that would not be allowed.

Who’s going to stop it. Your superior does not write “refused to sign false document” on your efficiency report. He just tosses in a little dig like “needs to work on loyalty”or even merely ranks you in the 97th percentile (what’s wrong with the 97th percentile?) knowing that the 97th percentile is really the 35th percentile to those in the know. (That’s the way it was done 35 years ago. No doubt the current method is different in its details, but the same in substance, that is, a seemingly innocuous compliment to the officer being rated is, in fact, the kiss of death.

Sheepish

At every new assignment, I got treated like a wild horse that needed to be broken. First a captain would try. Then I had to go see a major or colonel. Eventually they would send me to see a general.

Although I never had a fellow West Pointer as an immediate superior, there were some West Pointers two or more ranks above me. Once, In Vietnam, I was sent up to be “counseled” by a West Point full colonel who had already been announced as being promoted to general in the future. He had a reputation for being a “people person” so they thought maybe his nice guy approach would “straighten me out.”

When he asked for my side of the story, I generally told him what I described above. He became pensive, looked down at his lap, and quietly admitted that he had done some things that were wrong in his career, like sign false documents, because he felt he had no choice. I seemed to have reminded him of his idealistic youth at West Point. He spoke sheepishly about having sold out.

Then he caught himself and got back on message pursuing the goal of trying to impress the other officers by being the one who finally got me to “play the game.” I declined.

The problem wasn’t whether the approach to me was hard ass or nice guy. It was the underlying behavior of signing false documents and putting up with bullying regarding joining officers clubs I didn’t want to join, buying below-market-interest-rate savings bonds I didn’t want to buy, etc.

Beyond their comprehension

That West Point colonel was an exception. With all the others, non-West Pointers, concepts of integrity and right and wrong seemed beyond their comprehension. Partly it was because they were not very bright. Partly it was because people to whom such things were important got out of the military as soon as they could, leaving only those for whom integrity and right were foreign or irrelevant notions. Or maybe they were inclined to be honest when they entered the military, but they had become numb to and fully rationalized the immorality of the daily lying. Whatever the cause, you cannot have an intelligent discussion about integrity with the vast majority of career military officers. I have also observed some civilian bureaucracies up close. All bureaucracies have certain lies they must tell routinely. And all the lifelong employees of such bureaucracies have disabled that portion of their consciences in order to live with themselves.

One major told me the U.S. courts were totally corrupt and the wealthy always got off and the poor were always convicted. I said quietly, “Well, I’m not that cynical, sir.” He went nuts. Basically, he was bright enough to know the word “cynical” was a bad thing, although I doubt he knew what it meant. He also knew he outranked me and felt that precluded all criticism of him utterly without regard to the merit of the criticism. My attitude was that it would be fun for him to try to court martial me for the statement, but he just blew himself out ranting and raving and it was forgotten.

As you can see in the above “counseling” script, the rest treated me as if I was just one of the two percent who had not yet gotten the word about the way it was in the Army. In the spirit of the Soviet Union that the U.S. military so closely resembles in many ways, they would sometimes suggest that my refusal to sign false documents or attend “command performance” parties indicated some sort of psychiatric defect.

If you tried to debate whether lying was wrong, they would dismiss the discussion as childlike, unrelated to the real world. But mainly, these men had spent their entire adult lives lying. They knew nothing else and believed everyone did it both inside the military and outside, notwithstanding the fact that they had never been outside. The Army was their way of life. The people outside the Army were regarded as enemies. They believed that routine lies like signing false documents were just another way we in the Army protected ourselves from the undisciplined, unworthy civilians who did not and could not understand our superior perspective.

Trivial matters

Readers may regard the anecdotes above as mildly interesting, but trivial because rifle serial numbers and vehicle status are not that important in the grand scheme of things. They would be more impressed if I had refused to sign a document covering up an atrocity or something like that.

In corrupt organizations, whether it be Enron, the NY Police Department during the time that Frank Serpico was an officer, the Mafia, or the U.S. military, newcomers are tested before they are “trusted.” As Al Pacino said over and over in The Recruit, “Everything’s a test.”

Relatively new NYPD officers like Serpico, also played by Al Pacino, were invited to accept small bribes to show they were “one of us” before they were permitted knowledge about bigger stuff. Mafia wannabes are required to commit crimes confirmed by Mafia guys before they are allowed into the inner circle.

This has two purposes:

Signing false documents is a court martial offense. It violates the Uniform Code of Military Justice. If you sign a false document, you both gain entry to the “club” and you put yourself in a position where you cannot get out because if you ever go over to the media or authorities, they can trot out the false documents they know you signed to discredit and court martial you.

So after I was tested with signing less important documents and “failed,” I was generally assigned to be the assistant to some officer who was not authorized to have an assistant. I was also a platoon leader, XO, and company commander, but only in situations where that position was not required to sign false documents.

False documents are generally signed by the most junior officer (arms inventories), the battalion motor officer, and the company commander in line (fighting or potential fighting units) companies. I was the company commander of a 400-man, Advanced Individual Training company. I did not have to sign training schedules because my guys spent all day every day in formal Army schools. I was not responsible for training them, only for feeding, housing, and disciplining them. My company had no motor vehicles or motor pool.

‘Confirmed targets’

The only possible important thing I ever heard about was not something I was required to sign a document or take any other official action about. When I spent the night at a fire base 5 kilometers from the Cambodia border in Loc Ninh, the battery was blasting away with their cannons for much of the night.

Me: “What are you guys shooting at?”

Lieutenant: “H&I.”

Me: “Harassment and interdiction?”

Lt.: “Yeah. But we can’t call it that any more.”

Me: “Why not?”

Lt.: “Word came down from higher. No more H&I.”

Me: “So what do you call it now?”

Lt.: “Confirmed targets. We say they are confirmed bunkers and stuff like that. We make it up. We have to call the RVNs and get permission to make sure there’s no civilians in the area, but they don’t even check.”

Me: “How do you know that?”

Lt.: “They give instant approval of everything we ask. They don’t look at a map or ask anyone.”

Me: “Do you shoot fewer rounds now because of the new rule?”

Lt.: “God no! They keep charts of how many rounds each battalion shoots each night at corps headquarters. The battalion commander doesn’t want our line on the bar graph to be any lower than anyone else’s.”

I was just the communications platoon leader of that battalion so I had no occasion to be involved in target selection or reporting on what was being shot at. Were any civilians being hurt by those rounds? I don’t know. I was never shown a map or anything that indicated where they were firing or what was there. That was the base where I drove through the North Vietnamese ambush to get there once. It was “Indian country.” We did not wander around getting to know the neighborhood.

Important stuff

There is plenty of public evidence of the military lying about important stuff. Many of the other articles at this military Web site tell about various such incidents from My Lai to Pat Tillman to V.I.P. demo deaths, and so forth.

Resign

Some readers may wonder why I remained in the military for any length of time after I discovered it was corrupt.

1. West Point was not corrupt.
2. I wanted to graduate from West Point.
3. If you quit West Point after your sophomore year back then, you would immediately have to spend four years in the Army as an enlisted man, and if you quit after your junior year, you would immediately have to spend five years in the Army as an enlisted man. This was during the Vietnam war.
4. After you graduated from West Point in that era, you had to spend five years in the Army as an officer before you were allowed out.
5. I figured I would graduate, give the Army five years notice of my resignation, and simply refuse to comply with the OVUM and OPUM during my time in the military. I thought my superiors would be annoyed by my stance, but only mildly so, and that they would not dare do anything about it. Ha! Boy, was I wrong! But I was able to stick to my stance throughout my time as an Army officer.
6. When I drove out the gate of my last army base on the day I was discharged, I literally rolled down the car window and yelled, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty I’m free at last!”

Why the widespread dishonesty

Whenever you write about dishonesty in an organization, members or former members of that organization say that there are bad apples in every barrel, but that most people in the organization are good.

Bull!

First, we are talking about uniformed services here. They all wear the same shoes, clothes, and have the same haircuts. On a more subtle level, the married officers who live on post in the same neighborhoods as their superiors conform in other ways like the civilian clothes they wear (like their superiors), the cars they drive (like their superiors), and the leisure time activities they engage in (like their superiors), and so on. They slavishly conform in every way that might matter and refusing to sign false documents is certainly a way that matters.

No man can be more honest than his boss. If your boss is dishonest and you are honest you will very quickly be forced to rat him out. If you can’t be more honest than your boss, your boss cannot be more honest than his boss, and so forth. So the comprehensive way to state it is that no one can be more honest than anyone above them in the chain of command in their organization.

So who is above you when you are an Army lieutenant? At the top of the chain of command are the President and the Congress—536 politicians. To quote Hollywood mogul David Geffen, “Everyone in politics lies.”

Then you have generals. When I was a cadet and officer, the conventional wisdom in the Army was that becoming a general was all politics. Then you have the field-grade officers—majors and colonels. They are either hanging on for their pension or they are trying to be generals. They all work for guys who want to become generals or get an additional star. You don’t get to be a general by turning in an accurate motor vehicle status report that says 85% of the vehicles don’t work.

Above the politicians are the American people. They want a strong defense, but they also want low taxes. To an extent, the two desires are incompatible. So instead of telling them that they don’t have enough money to fix the vehicles, the military just lies and says they are fixed when they are not.

Actually, the military has enough money to fix the vehicles if they were not a government bureaucracy. If company commanders could get a budget and have the vehicles fixed by a local civilian mechanic, they would work just fine and be within budget. But as long as the military is a Situation Normal, All Fouled Up government bureaucracy with Soviet-style central planning that insists on doing everything in-house, they don’t have enough money.

Politicians do not relate such unpleasant truths to the voters. So the military leaders tell the politicians what the voters want to hear—we fixed the vehicles just fine with the money and organization structure you gave us.

Groupthink

While writing about behavioral finance for my real estate investment readers, I came across details on the concept of “groupthink,” a word invented by William H. Whyte, author of the classic book The Organization Man. The Wikipedia write-up on groupthink is scarily accurate with regard to the lack of integrity in the military. Here are some thoughts on what Wikipedia said.

Members try to minimize conflict and achieve unanimity. To do that, they must reject crticial thinking about, or objectively analyzing, ideas that conflict with current ways of doing things. They “avoid promoting viewpoints outside the comfort zone of consensus thinking. ...motives...such as...a desire to avoid embarassing or angering oter members of the group [mainly superiors in the military]”

William Whyte said in a 1952 Fortune article,

What we are talking about is a rationalized conformity—an open, articulate philosophy which holds that group values are not only expedient but right and good as well.

The late Irving Janis was a professor at Yale and the University of California and an expert on groupthink. He said it is,

A mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.

Wikipedia goes on to say,

Highly cohesive groups are much more likely to engage in groupthink. The closer they are, the less likely they are to raise questions [that] break the cohesion.

...group cohesion will only lead to groupthink if one of the following...is present:

Social psychologist Clark McCauley’s three conditions for groupthink are:

With regard to similarity of members background and ideology, see the discussion about that in my article about the consequences of not having a draft.

Wikipedia also has eight symptoms of groupthink which are quite pertinent to the U.S. military.

Now reconsider the notion that the people who lie in the military are merely the few “bad apples” who exist in every organization in light of the characteristics of groupthink. In fact, the military is not like, say, the student body of the incoming freshman class at Iowa State. Rather it is extremely cohesive and militantly so with uniforms, haircuts, salutes, calling officers sir, unit pride, etc. also, the career members of the military self-select such that the longer one has been in the military, the more they have bought into the groupthink there. Finally, the extreme power that superiors have over subordinates in the military would, all by itself, eliminate any differences between the career “apples.”

Military responsible, too

The military leaders are also responsible to an extent. I have read that about 2/3 of West Point graduates since the sixties have gotten out of the Army early rather than stayed for a career (at least 20 years). 44% in the most recent class to reach the first stay in or get-out point. West Pointers get out of the Army from the fifth anniversary of graduation to about the twelfth. After that, the present value of the generous retirement benefits generally causes the officer to stay in for the remaining eight years. I suspect they got out in large part for the same reasons I did. They were disgusted with the lack of integrity and boot licking required of U.S. military officers. They played the game to avoid trouble while they were in, then got out because they hated the game—or because their wives hated it.

Non-West Point officers and enlisted did the same. Those who stayed in self-selected the stuff I describe above. To go back to the “good apples bad apples” metaphor, newcomers to the military probably include all kinds of “apples” in both enlisted and officer ranks—like society as a whole. But over time, the kinds of “apples” that do not feel comfortable with the military way of doing things get out of the military leaving only the sorts of “apples” that are comfortable with it. Among the lifers, there is only one kind of “apple” in the military—the kind that “plays the game.” Try being a different kind of “apple” there and see what happens to you.

I have discussed it with career officers. Generally, their position is that yes the military is as I depict, but they think those problems are not that important and that they like the whole package—camaraderie, travel, more responsibility than they would get in civilian life, good benefits, and all that—and are willing to take the bad with the good. They also all claim they they did not ever have to sign a false document. I am extremely skeptical about that.

The military is nothing if not uniform. And that uniformity extends to everything including integrity. It has to because when you combine lack of integrity at the top of an organization with extreme power by the entire chain of command over the lower ranking members and human nature, you get uniform conformity to all of that organization’s top-down group norms.

And speaking as one who tried to resist the military group norm regarding signing false documents and attending “command performance” parties and all that, I can report to you that the organization will attack you like white blood cells attacking an infection in the blood stream if you dare deviate from those group norms.

Hypocrisy

Although the politicians at the top are the cause of the lack of integrity in the military, they at least sort of admit their own lack of integrity. I believe when Congressman Jerry Ford became Vice President then President when Nixon resigned, he joked in his first speech to Congress about “pork” being a federal project being built in someone else’s district, whereas projects being built in your own district were “essential to the national interest.”

That sort of two-faced nonsense is part and parcel of being a politician. It is also part and parcel of working for politicians—as military officers do. But the next time I hear a military officer joke about signing false documents or sucking up to his superiors will be the first time. Quite the contrary, military officers affect an indignant, holier-than-thou demeanor when the mere suggestion of dishonesty comes up. The security-deposit story I told above is quite typical.

In other words, politicians are hypocrites. But career military officers are much bigger hypocrites. And in the case of West Point graduates, this is in spite of the excellent Cadet Prayer which says in pertinent part,

... suffer not our hatred of hypocrisy and pretence ever to diminish.

I recall no hypocrisy or lack of integrity at West Point. (Actually, forcing us to go to chapel every Sunday at West Point was wrong—unconstitutional—as was the retaliation against those who tried to fight it—they instantly got so many demerits unrelated to not going to chapel that they were kicked out of West Point for conduct rather than for refusing to go to chapel so they could not litigate about the chapel requirement. West Point has since been forced to end the mandatory chapel requirement.) Not counting the chapel requirement, it was a great place in those regards.

But they need to change the explanation in Bugle Notes as to why West Point has the Cadet Honor Code. It’s not because officers must have unquestioned integrity. For all intents and purposes, integrity is about as welcome as a skunk at a tea party in the military officer corps.

The real reason for the Cadet Honor Code is it is the cadets’ last chance to be honest before they join the officer corps—at least until they get out of the military. In civilian life, there are opportunities to be self-employed, as I am, or to work for small, honest organizations.

I love the ideals of West Point and the Army. West Point lived up to them in my experience. The Army did not even try. To them, honor is just so much public relations eyewash.

Hypocrisy-induced suicides

Because military officers put on such a big show of self-righteous indignation when the subject of their “honor” comes up, They set themselves up for far more extreme embarrassment when they are revealed to be hypocrites as well as liars.

As I related in my article on whether military personnel deserve all the medals they wear or get all the medals they deserve, the top officer in the Navy committed suicide when it was revealed that he was wearing a hero medal that his personnel file showed no indication that he was entitled to wear. If a used-car salesman or military NCO got caught doing the exact same thing—that is claiming to have won that medal—he would probably just laugh it off when he got caught. But getting caught doing that when you have been so stiff-necked about your integrity for so long, as is common among officers, can lead to suicide. It probably ought to be standard procedure in the military to put a suicide watch on officers who get caught in breaches of integrity. In another article, I reported on Lt. Col. Westhusing, who appears to have committed suicide in Iraq because of integrity-related anxieties. Lt. Col. Marshall Gutierrez who committed suicide at age 41 in Kuwait appears to be yet another.

The 10/20/07 Wall Street Journal carried a front-page article about him. It described him as a “straight arrow” with a “spotless record.” As described above, while his official record may have been spotless, it generally is impossible to reach his rank without going along with things that an honest man ought not go along with. I would not put any stock in a military officer of that rank or higher having a “spotless official record.” Indeed, the rank itself implies a “spotless record.” The Army would maintain that all its lt. col.s are “straight arrows with spotless records.” If you doubt that, ask them to name the ones who are not.

According to the article, Gutierrez discovered that the Army was being grossly overcharged for food and such in Kuwait and blew the whistle. The contractor on whom he blew the whistle said Gutierrez solicited bribes. Army investigators agree with the contractor, who was convicted of fraud. The Army investigators drew the conclusion that Gutierrez was guilty after the Lt. Col. had a meeting with a Kuwaiti who was wearing a wire monitored by the investigators.

Gutierrez, who was married to an American, got married to an 18-year old Kuwaiti woman shortly after his wife returned to the U.S. to care for a sick relative. Gutierrez was charged with bribery, mishandling secret information, accepting illegal gifts, bigamy, and illegal possession of weapons, alcohol, and pornography.

I cannot tell from the Journal story whether Gutierrez was corrupt. There appears to be no doubt about the other charges. The Journal itself seems skeptical about the corruption charges. While signing false reports and such is pervasive in the military, I never saw any indication that taking bribes and crimes like that were. Although I would say the same about bigamy, which Gutierrez appears to have committed. (They have the Kuwaiti marriage certificate and so forth.)

And human nature in general is such that relatively low paid individuals who make decisions about the awarding of large contracts are often offered, and sometimes take, bribes. When I managed apartment buildings, I was offered a couple of bribes by laundry concessionaires and such. One subcontractor there thanked me for not demanding bribes. “Why did you say that?” I asked. He said my predecessor in that job made him pay bribes and showed me the canceled checks made to cash but endorsed by my predecessor. I immediately reported all of these bribes offers and past bribes to my boss. Later, I heard that my successor was fired for taking bribes. My secretary in that job said that all the men in the office of the property manager she previously worked for took bribes.

An email from a naval officer

I got an email from a U.S. naval officer about these military pages. I asked him if he thought I got anything wrong. Here is his answer.

Mr. Reed,

Did you get anything wrong? I didn't find any glaring technical inaccuracies. Reasonable minds can differ on matters of opinion, though I agree with about 90% of your opinions on the military being process-focused and possessing a CYA mind set. My experience has been pretty much all Navy, with [brief periods] working with the Army...big eye-opener. I also [worked with] the Air Force and Marine Corps, and saw their respective service cultures. Definitely different than the Navy.

As far as ethics go, my experiences differed from yours, so I wouldn't generalize what seem to be atrocious Army ethics to all the services. I spent...years on a nuclear submarine...and it seemed that there integrity meant something. I never, *ever*, saw pressure (on me or my seniors) to sign or falsify reports.

In three years of commissioned service on surface ships, I was never pressured to lie or sign something that wasn't true. One of my fellow junior officers lied about an ammunition inventory, and got into a bit of trouble when the bullets...signed for came up missing, but no one pressured ...to lie...was just too lazy to count them. Then...had the audacity to ask other JO's "don't you guys just sign? I mean nobody actually counts these, right?" (Response: "Um...yeah, we actually count. I'm not gonna screw around with ammo.")

Is it b/c the Navy is more honest or ethical? I doubt it-- I'm no Navy apologist. Perhaps if our equipment was so messed up that telling the truth would get the CO fired, we'd be pressured to lie. In the years...on the ships I served, the equipment worked, so we never had to consider lying. I agree with you, however, that the military has no shortage of bootlickers who will sign, stamp, or say whatever they must to curry favor with their boss.

I'll send more "informed, well-thought-out constructive criticism and suggestions" when I make more time for e-mail.

[I removed the name on my own initiative]

[Reed comments on the email: I assumed that the Navy, Air Force, and Marines were the same as the Army with regard to falsifying reports. The Marines got into trouble for falsifying the maintenance records for the Osprey helicopter program. Here is a paragraph about it from the Wikipedia entry on the Osprey

Additionally, the V-22 squadron's former commander at New River, Lieutenant Colonel Odin Lieberman, reputedly instructed his unit that they needed to falsify maintenance records to make the plane appear more reliable. A crew member's recording included him stating that, "We need to lie or manipulate the data, or however you wanna call it"

On 10/25/07, the Associated Press reported that the Navy announced it relieved Commander Michael Portman from being commander of the U.S.S. Hampton, a nuclear submarine. Why? His crew failed to do safety checks on the nuclear reactor for a month then falsified the records to make it look like they had done those safety checks.

The Navy and Air Force are staffed by humans and are subordinate to the same Congress and President as the Army. So if the Navy and Air Force are in the habit of being more honest than the Army and Marines, I applaud them and apologize for saying otherwise. But I am skeptical.

Falsifying nuclear submarine tests

Here is an item from my local daily newspaper on 3/9/08:

Eleven officers and sailors from a San Diego-based Navy submarine have been disciplined for falsifying tests on a nuclear reactor and cheating on officer advancement exams.

They falsified weekly tests on the chemical content of the water used to cool the sub’s nuclear reactor as far back as 11/06 and maybe earlier than that. The commanding officer and chief engineer of the sub were relieved of their commands. Why not court martialed? I expect because such behavior is widespread in the Navy and the people who decided not to court martial them did so because they have unclean hands themselves.

One possible explanation for less corruption in the Navy, in the unlikely event that is the case, may be that the Army parks their trucks for decades at a time as far as I saw when I was in. When you never drive them, you can lie about whether you can drive them and get away with it. The Navy and the Air Force seem to have to actually operate their vessels and aircraft and they do so in conditions where people could die if they were not up to snuff. People have died in Ospreys and in nuclear submarine failures.

At Pearl Harbor, I saw a photo of a WW II submarine that had to rig sails to get back to Pearl Harbor. Why? The skipper forgot to fill the fuel tanks before he left and ran out of diesel—during a war! The Army had a zillion trucks that needed sails for various reasons when I was in. But no one ever made them drive them so no one knew.

I thought the Army’s habit of lying whenever they felt like it was an inevitable result of human nature combined with bureaucracy, although I saw some resistance to the lying by Army doctors and lawyers. See my article on the lack of moral courage in the U.S. military officer corps and the rare examples of moral courage—all by non-service academy officers. If the email I got is accurate, it would appear that the Army has created its own unique-among-the-services lower level of integrity.

I note that the Army is the biggest service. In most of our wars, it is the most important of the services.

I also am chagrined to note that the Army is the service of my alma mater West Point. West Point, at least when I was there in 1964 to 1968, had the most robust cadet honor code. For example, a Naval Academy midshipmen who stayed in my room at West Point on an exchange visit bragged about how they were allowed to lie while we were a bunch of Boy Scouts. Then he suddenly caught himself and asked, “Your honor code doesn’t require you to report us for honor violations does it?” “No.” He was quite relieved. If I understand correctly, the Naval Academy had an honor code then, and probably still does. It just did not appear to be as strictly enforced.

But if the above email is accurate, the robustness of the West Point Cadet Honor Code seems to have no effect after graduation while the absence of a strict one at the other academies nevertheless seems not to prevent a better result in terms of graduate behavior. Go figure.

Another email from a person familiar with the Navy said a great deal of the repairs and replacements performed on Navy and Marine aircraft would not have been necessary if those services had performed prescribed preventive maintenance. That is an outrage and a hazard to the pilots, crews, and passengers. According to that person, the Navy and Marines are every bit as screwed up as the service I served in: the Army.

Moral Charge of the Light Brigade

In the 1980s, after the most serious Honor Code scandal in its history, West Point brought the highly respected Andrew J. Goodpaster out of retirement to be its superintendent. He was a West Point graduate and, if I recall correctly, a four-star general. I believe he had to take a temporary demotion to three-star general to take the job.

He was brought in to restore the Cadet Honor Code. I read an article he wrote about the need to reinstate the Honor Code in the Corps of Cadets (student body). It was the usual “the Army needs honest officers so the cadets needed to be greatly strengthened in that department.”

I sent him a letter telling him some of my experience in the Army and saying his plan for the cadets was fine as far as it went, but that if he did not make the Army officer corps more accepting of officers with integrity, he was merely sending his new, honest West Point graduates on a “moral Charge of the Light Brigade.”

I later met him at the Presidio of San Francisco Officers Club at a pre-game pep rally before an Army-Stanford football game. When I mentioned the letter, he remembered it and thanked me for the line “moral Charge of the Light Brigade” which he said he had since been using when he spoke to officers groups.

Glad to hear it, but I have not seen any evidence that the Army has changed in that regard. Take the Pat Tillman incident for example. Considering the first line of every “counseling”session I got—“Lieutenant Reed, You can’t change the Army”—I’m not surprised.

I cannot vouch for whether Goodpaster restored the Honor Code at West Point, but if he did, the President needed to send him or another man of similar capability to do the same with the Army as a whole. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

Honor Code experiments in the book Predictably Irrational

The 2008 book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely contains accounts of interesting experiments on when people behave dishonestly. One finding was that people are more honest if you ask them to recall the Ten Commandments just before you test their honesty. That is just asking them to recall them, not supplying them wih the actual Ten Commandments. Also, they found that honor codes in the workplace do reduce dishonesty.

It is noteworthy that we had a simple honor code at West Point that everyone knew verbatim and had been trained in repeatedly throughout the four years there. In the military officer corps, in stark contrast, although it claims that honesty is essential, there is no military honor code. (There is a Code of Conduct that we had to memorize, but that only pertains to your behavior when you are a prisoner of war and does not cover integrity.) If you ask ten military officers what the military honor code is you would get ten different answers including shrugs. That is telling and is one of the reasons why cadets are honest and military officers are not.

Col. David Hackworth’s book About Face

I read David Hackworth’s 875-page book About Face and found therein many instances where he makes comments similar to mine or relates incidents similar to those I relate. Here are some of them.

In the introduction, journalist and Hackworth friend Ward Just says,

…Hackworth’s disgust and pessimism grew with each tour. He found the Army lying to itself and to everyone else. The Pentagon seemed to be treating the war as the occasion for career management of its officers, every lieutenant colonel entitled to a battalion, every colonel to a brigade, and never mind the officer’s qualifications. Meanwhile, the war was being lost, buried in an avalanche of bogus statistics and false promises of progress.

Hackworth gave his pessimistic after-action report to senior American commanders and was told to sit down and shut up. Defeatists were not welcome. The truth was unspeakable.

Hackworth disclosed the bankruptcy of American training and tactics and the incapacity of the Vietnamese Army, identified the lies and some of the liars who kept it afloat, and all but declared the [Vietnam] war a lost cause, unwinnable. This was the simple truth, but in the pusillanimous atmosphere of 1971, Hackworth was seen as insubordinate and treacherous.

Some have tried to say that Hackworth and I are out of date. I’m sure we are in some respects, but the basic problem appears unchanged. The military is still a government bureaucracy run by careerists. Although Hackworth is deceased and I have been out of the Army for 35 years, the media bring a weekly drumbeat of stories that reveal that the military is still conducting the same business as usual as it did during the Vietnam war. No doubt some of the deck chairs have been rearranged, but the military “ship sails on” as before.

One thing Hackworth reported that I had not previously known was that the Army was relatively honest until the Korean war and that a particular new policy changed the group norm from honest to dishonest. That policy required officers to fill out a KCL (Korean Certificate of Loss) in which they had to account for missing equipment—in a combat zone no less! Essentially, the requirement was unrealistic. The officers had a choice between lying and getting into trouble so they lied. That’s no excuse. But according to Hackworth, it was the event that turned the U.S. Army officer corps into a pack of liars in general. He puts it this way on page 253,

Not only did this mean an enormous amount of paperwork at the company level (the last thing we needed as we attempted to fight a war), but it also made liars of us all.

I did not get into the Army until about 15 years later. However, the Army that I saw was fully engaged in signing false documents on a routine, daily basis. It was described to be as the way the Army was. Well, if Hackworth is to be believed, it was the way the Army was only since the early 1950s KCL policy was instituted. That is a mildly interesting theory of the genesis of the dishonest group norm. If true, it is a sad commentary on how easy it was to corrupt the entire officer corps.

More importantly, no officer or civilian overseer since then has been interested in expending his own political capital to correct it. Apparently, daily dishonesty is not seen as a high priority problem.

I also recommend readers interested in this topic read the chapters in my Succeeding book on:

• Reputation
  
• Values
  
• Self employment
  
• Working for other people
  
• Making an honest living
  
• Conflict and conflict avoidance

Reader Jackie Lehman read this page and sent me the following email:

Dear Mr. Reed,

I recently read the pages on your web-site about military matters. I was a PFC in the US Army, by the way, from 1973 to 1975. I found nothing to disagree with at all in your writings. Certainly you may quote me. If I had time, I would corroborate, elaborate, and/or add examples from my own recollection, of the curious state of the US Army.

Further details of my military experience: Driver of M60A1 tank, MOS: 11E20, mostly in 2/63 Battalion, of 1st Infantry Div. About a year in Germany, remainder in Ft. Riley, KS. Zero combat. Plenty of sweeping the leaves out of the motor pool. Honorable discharge, nonetheless.

Jackie Lehman
Hercules, CA

I appreciate informed, well-thought-out constructive criticism and suggestions.

John T. Reed

Link to information about John T. Reed’s Succeeding book which, in part, relates lessons learned about succeeding in life from being in the military

John T. Reed Publishing home page - John T. Reed military home page