Leadership Forum: Conduct Unbecoming

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Prize Winner

Vincent Astor Memorial Leadership Essay Contest

Conduct Unbecoming

By Captain C. A. Leader, U. S. Marine Corps

Admirals and ensigns seem to mo­nopolize leadership forums; the senior officers speak as masters and the ju­niors as apprentices. The perspective of both groups is personal, and this intimate view of leadership is tradi­tional—not only to the naval service, but to the nation. That an individual can decisively influence events is an American tradition. This view is re­flected in our national expectation that one individual—the President—can have an immediate, decisive effect on complex organizations and situations.

Tolstoy’s theme in War and Peace that individuals influence the course of history less than they are driven by it is not typically American. The American view of history is a chro­nology of biographies; the stories of presidents and generals shaping the national character. Brave young offi­cers prove their leadership and be­come admirals or generals. This per­ception of the overriding value of a leader is reflected in the American penchant (unusual in a free society) of electing generals to the presidency. Military leadership appears equated in the American mind with decisive civil leadership. This belief in the universal power of individual leadership is par­ticularly evident in internal military discussion.

Individuals play an undeniable role in shaping both large and small events. Institutions play as great or greater a role in influencing the same events. As great as responsibility for individual leadership is, the institution’s re­sponsibility to provide leadership is greater because it has wider effect.

An institution is more than its or­ganization; it is more than manage­ment relationships. The character of an institution is determined by its identification of and dedication to an overriding value. The nature of that value establishes the manner and methods of the institution. But unless those values are enforced and action is taken against those who do not sup­port them, the ideals become super-

ficial; painting the words, “To protect and serve” on the doors of police cars does not make a police force effective. In a military organization devoid of an institutional character and without an established value, decoration and pro­motion become the highest values the individual can aspire to achieve.

Establishment and enforcement of institutional values entails the crea­tion of a formal or informal code of professional conduct. Romantically and historically, this standard has been the officer’s code—based on the premise that officers were account­able to a loftier code than the Articles of War, which were designed to con­trol the potential misconduct of en­listed personnel.

Such a premise is currently inap­propriate; now, we have a Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). Strangely, the UCMJ maintains the romantic notion that officers—as a class—are responsible to a higher ethic of conduct than the people they lead. An article proscribes “conduct un­becoming an officer.” It would be in­teresting to know the last time a vio­lation of that article stood the test of court-martial.

The UCMJ is an objective code; any subjective results are incidental. It is a code of law and not of conduct. Only violations are defined; a positive code of desired conduct is not mentioned— except by exclusion. The area of con­duct unexcluded by the UCMJ is a broad field of play.

At one time, the lack of a more spe­cific and positive ethic of conduct was not a problem for the service. During the 19th century, the West Point motto “Duty, Honor, Country” was the only formal codification necessary for the military ethic. The service was inti­mate, stable, and it shared common Judeo-Christian values. Within this context, "duty,” “honor,” and “coun­try” represented much more specific ideals than those words seem to con­note today.

This situation of stability and shared values has changed dramatically since World War II. The size of the service has deprived the military communities of shared duty experience. The loss of universal moral values has had an even greater effect in the dissolution of any previous military code. The ju­dicial attempt to enforce a separation of church and state has had the effect of separating Judeo-Christian ethics from the instruments of the state.

The service has been slow in ac­knowledging this effect and providing a moral code to replace the Judeo- Christian ethic. Instead, to fill the vac­uum created by having no shared re­ligious basis for a professional code, we witnessed the emergence of what is charitably called situation ethics.

Ethics and moral judgments, whether personal or professional, have always been situational. No value sys­tem is so codified as to dictate in each of the infinitely varying circumstances of life the single ethical course. What seems to be meant by situation ethics in practice, however, is that—short of violating civil or military law—what­ever course the individual takes is eth­ically acceptable.

This is an extremely dangerous con­cept for an organization. It leads to a decay of common values. When any value that cannot be proven illegal is acceptable, the institution as a cohe­sive whole has no values of its own. The absence of morality is not im­morality; it is amorality. The concept of conduct unbecoming an officer has no meaning in an amoral environment.

The decay and destruction of the German Army, formerly one of the world’s great military institutions, should serve as a warning. It is illu­minating to examine the role of insti­tutional values and an ethical code in that army’s decline.

The golden age of the German Army is generally considered to have been from the time of Gerhard von Scharn- horst to that of Count Alfred von Schlieffen (c. 1813-1913). Scharn- horst’s strategy in developing that nearly peerless institution’s profes­sional character and the subsequent reasons for its dissolution are both model and cause for self-examination.

In Scharnhorst’s time, Germany did not have the reputation of producing excellent soldiers and had recently lost its war against Napoleon (1806). The institution of military excellence was formalized principally through rigor­ous professional education and en­forcement of an uncompromising code of officer conduct. The accomplish­ments of the German War College and General Staff Corps are relatively well known. Less appreciated is the insti­tutional leadership exercised through the officer’s code and its concentra­tion on the value of individual ethical character.

Saber duels and cheek scars are the cliched images of the German Officer Corps. But they ignore the fact that duels were the actions of students, and not of professional officers. Courts of honor were convened to provide Be- friedigunfcihigkeit (satisfaction) in questions of individual honor.

Courts of honor, a subjective tri­bunal different in purpose from a court- martial, were composed of officers who judged the actions and motives of an officer against the values of the officer corps. These courts of honor had the power to recommend separation of both the accuser and the accused if either officer had violated the ethics of conduct.

In this self-policing manner, indi­vidual and institutional honors were given substance. The concepts were living, evolving models that became more than ideals through enforce­ment. The courts of honor demon­strated that the officer corps could— and would—establish what conduct was demanded of its members.

The more recent phenomenon of the proliferation of lawyers and legalism in the service makes it almost unbe­lievable that in the 19th century this nation used the court-martial as a court of honor. To officers raised under the UCMJ and exposed to its legalistic ap­proach to institutional behavior, a shared ethic and paternalistic ap­proach to enforcing a subjective code are difficult to visualize.

A decay of the shared ethic was crit­ical in the decline of the German Of­ficer Corps. Although the motives were diametrically opposed. Hitler’s Na­tional Socialist philosophy had an ef­fect similar to the American judicial separation of church and state in split­ting the professional military code from Christian values. The Waffen SS, the combatant arm of the SS, which se­lected, trained, promoted, and as­signed its officers separately from the German Army, is probably the ulti­mate Western example of church and state value separation.

Interestingly, and critical to the Waffen SS’s fighting effectiveness, traditional Christian values were re­placed by a clearly defined and en­forced National Socialist code of per­formance that provided a standard of professionalism. Instead of tradition- or religion-derived values, the Waffen SS used a hodgepodge of myth and Teutonic mysticism.

Two lessons should be obvious from the Waffen SS experience. First, a professional code of ethics or stan­dards is needed in any military insti­tution to provide cohesion and direc­tion; normally, the Waffen SS fought well. Second, the divorce of situation ethics from a larger ethical value is dangerous. The fervent National So­cialist officer who made his ethical de­cisions based on the specific situation and violated no laws of the Third Reich often found himself on trial for war crimes. A professional ethic—partic­ularly in the military—must be con­sonant with international morality.

Although the German Army was more oriented toward traditional Christian values than the Waffen SS, the decline of its ethical base was ob­vious. Writing for an unpublished U. S. Army Historical Division European Command study in the late 1940s, Ob- erst (Colonel) Walter Reissinger, a former General Staff Officer, noted that the loss of Christian ethics as a higher authority . . meant that the stan­dard for independent moral judgement had been largely lost.”

Deprived of an ethical value, situ­ation ethics had no meaning. Reissin­ger further noted that as a result of the loss of its ethical foundation, ". . .our concept of honor was little more than one of etiquette, a social or profes­sional mask.”

For an institution to reach a level of unselfish professional dedication under the elder von Moltke and em­body his admonition to officers (“Ac­complish much, remain in the back­ground, be more than you appear to be.”) and then be allowed to decay is a tragedy.

Oberst Herrmann Teske, also writ­ing for the U. S. Army Historical Di­vision, noted in an essay on the Ger­man performance evaluation system that under Hitler, “An ever increasing phenomenon. . .was the demand for accomplishments, for visible and measurable results which slowly pushed into the background the eval­uation of the man and his character." Teske also noted a . steady de­cline of education for real spiritual in­dependence.”

Teske’s comments are strikingly similar to those of critics today who warn of the rise of a new class of mil­itary courtiers; officers who parody von Moltke’s dictum and seem to be more than they are. The military courtier, if he exists as a class, is more adept at organizational politics and the fur­thering of his own career advance­ment than he is at dedicating himself to a profession based on the concept of service. Where once officers were apolitical, moral, and committed to

national service, the military courtier is political, amoral, and committed to self-service.

The emergence of a class of military courtiers, or at least of growing indi­cators that the military environment is favorable to self-serving tactics of Machiavellianism, is a problem of weak institutional leadership. The most frightening indicator is the lack of member confidence in the leadership of the institution—a problem that cir­cumstances make difficult for flag of­ficers to appreciate.

This lack of confidence in the insti­tution is most obvious to the junior officer. He is in a position to know both the first-term enlistee and the ca­reer serviceman, and the problems of retention are not statistically abstract to him. He knows his best subor­dinates and why many of them choose not to reenlist. The junior officer knows how little faith many of his subordi­nates possess in the institution, its leadership, and its justice.

Not far removed from the univer­sity, the junior officer is aware that, as a group, the best of his classmates did not enter the service. Further, he has seen many of his best contem­poraries leave the service. The disil­lusionment experienced by many of the best mid-rank officers does not es­cape notice of the junior officer, nor do the motives of many officers who retire after 20 years of service.

To complain about the imperfec­tions of the service and his seniors is a right of the junior officer. However, there is a tremendous difference be­tween impatient dissatisfaction with a loved but flawed institution, and a cynical lack of faith in the institution, its values, and its leaders.

The most bitter reality of institu­tional leadership problems is that no individual can effect an overall change. The naval service is so large, complex, and influenced by such a great number of other institutions and events that it is beyond the power of any individ­ual to effect a decisive change of course.

The weakness of the institutional leadership of both the French Army and Government was evident to some observers before their collapse in May 1940. Those who demanded change and leadership became prophets after the astonishingly rapid fall of the Third Republic. As in the Bible, however, those prophets had been previously ignored in their own land.

In retrospect, the fragility of the French institutions should have been obvious. Underlying whatever politi­cal and strategic mistakes were made was the failure of the institution to ad­dress the cause and effects of the 1917 army mutiny as a leadership problem of institutional dimensions.

Although the indicators for the French are obvious in retrospect, they were not so at the time. In the future, others may reflect on signal indicators of a fatal leadership problem with the U. S. military: the Vietnam-era "frag­ging” assassinations, shipboard riots and sabotage, the uneven conduct of POWs and failure to seriously exam­ine a code for POW behavior, lack of resolution of the USS Pueblo (AGER- 2), and organizational pettiness re­flected in the Mayaguez operation and the Iranian rescue attempt.

History is replete with examples of successful institutions raised from the ashes of defeat: Napoleon's creation of the Grand Army from the chaos of the French Revolution, Scharnhorst’s reorganization of the German Army in the 19th century. Hitler’s efforts with his army in the 1930s, and Soviet re­surgence in 1943.

Much less typical is a successful in­stitution born of foresight rather than failure, of a winning tradition rather than a lost war. Lord Fisher’s reform of the British Navy in the early 20th century is one such example.

In the United States, having only come away with ties at best in its last two wars, the argument that the ser­vice institution must be examined prior to risking the loss of the next war re­quires thoughtful reflection and not smug rejection.

Institutional leadership is not a one­time problem to be solved. It does not yield to the quick fix. It is never the result of slogans and cliches unless the words of those verbalized ideals are made consistent through promotion, assignment, education, and training.

Neither is institutional leadership solely the responsibility of flag rank. The decision to lead the institution must be a collective determination by its members to further a common ideal. It is this shared commitment between the most senior and the most junior members that generates the cohesion, loyalty, and trust that allows a military force to persevere and succeed.

Although leadership will always manifest itself in the traditional ex­changes between superior and sub­ordinate, this is not its sole province. Leadership is also the art of creating character in a military institution and instilling the cohesion and fighting ef­fectiveness that produce victories.

The naval service deserves our sin­cere effort to provide it with a collec­tive institutional leadership. The affir­mation of a service ethic and code of conduct is a worthy goal.

(Continued from page 21) Comment and Discussion